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7 Eur. Data Prot. L. Rev. 477 (2021)
Privacy at the Margins

handle is hein.journals/edpl7 and id is 503 raw text is: Book Review 1477 Book Review The Book Reviews section will introduce you to the latest and most interesting books on a wide range of topics pertaining to the law and policy of data protection. For further information on the submis- sion of reviews please contact the Book Reviews Editor Gloria Gonzalez Fuster at Gloria.Gonza- lez.Fuster@vub.be. Privacy at the Margins By Scott Skinner-Thompson Cambridge University Press 2020, 220 pp. £ 24.99 ; Paperback Julien Rossi* The right to privacy is supposed to be a universal human right. It expresses itself in ways that are cul- turally and historically situated, but it is recognised by many privacy advocates as being fundamental to the emotional and social well-being of all. Yet recent events have reminded us that privacy violations intersect with structural social inequali- ties. As recently as in January 2021, Dutch Prime Min- ister Mark Rutte had to resign and call for elections under the pressure of a parliamentary report finding that thousands of welfare recipients had had their benefits cut, sinking them into poverty, because of a biased fraud monitoring system. The same month, Grindr was fined by the Norwegian Data Protection Authority for disclosing the sexual orientation of its users to advertising companies. And in that same year, we learnt that NSO's Pegasus sophisticated sur- DOI: 1O.21552/edpl/2021/3/18 Julien Rossi is an Associate Professor at Universite catholique de l'Ouest, and associate researcher at COSTECH (Universite de technologie de Compiegne), PREFICS (Universite Rennes 2), invited research fellow at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Szeged, and co-chair of the Working group on Internet Governance and Regulation of GDR 2091 Internet, IA et Societe (CNRS). For correspondence: <julien.rossi@uco.fr> 1 Anita L. Allen, Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society (Rowman & Littlefield 1988). 2 John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (University of Chicago Press 2001). 3 Andre Vitalis and Armand Mattelart, Le profilage des populations: Du livret ouvrier au cybercontrole (La D6couverte 2014). 4 Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (First Edition, St Martin's Press 2018). 5 Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, 'Privacy at the Margins' (2018) 12 [JOLT, 1157 < https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/arti- cle/view/7053/2293 > accessed 23 August 2021. veillance software had been used by the ruler of the Emirate of Dubai to target, kidnap and then sequester his own daughter. These are just a few examples in a long list that show how people in subordinate groups, such as those who are financially disadvan- taged, non-heterosexual, women, racialised and/or from an ethnic, religious or political minority are dis- proportionately affected by surveillance, intrusion into privacy and its negative consequences. Scott Skinner-Thompson is an Associate Professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado, whose research focuses on the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transsexual and Queer (LGBTQ) minorities as well as those of people affected by the Acquired Im- munodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). His latest book, Privacy at the Margins, describes the effects privacy violations have on people living at the margins, and denounces the unequal access to legal remedy such people have in the United States' (US) legal system, based on a queer and intersectional feminist episte- mology. The topic his book deals with is far from novel in and by itself. Unequal access to privacy due to gen- der discrimination has been denounced by Anita Allen's Uneasy Access, published in 1988.1 John Gilliom provides an account of how everyday surveil- lance by welfare recipients is perceived and resisted in Overseers of the Poor, published in 2001.2 Andr6 Vitalis and Armand Mattelart's Le profilage des pop- ulations, published in 2014,3 and Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality, published in 2018,4 both trace back the roots of modern automated surveillance sys- tems used to target, monitor and control people liv- ing at the margins to older policies and tools of so- cial control such as the French 'livret ouvrier' (work- er's booklet) introduced by Napoleon, and poorhous- es erected across the US during the 19th Century. There was even a special section of the International Journal of Communication edited by Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, published in 2018 which also bore the title of 'Privacy at the Margins'.5 EDPL 312021

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