| Summary: | Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to provide the FBI with a backdoor to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, typifies the corporate appropriation of privacy rights discourse. In light of this appropriation, I propose a reconsideration of the sovereign subject presupposed by privacy rights discourse through a comparative approach to the US and EU’s treatments of privacy rights. I then apply feminist theories of the non-sovereign subject, which challenge liberal democratic discourse’s construction of the subject by emphasising social interdependence. I argue that critical scholars of surveillance and the digital economy need to address the fact that the digital economy is predicated on the subject’s non-sovereignty, where individuals can be fragmented and combined into the mass collection of data. I conclude with a discussion of how the non-sovereignty of the subject under commercial surveillance could also provide the grounds for the socialized redistribution of big data profits.
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