Data Double

A data double is an assemblage of seemingly opaque data flows or fragments of information (such as audio, smell, chemical, visual, and ultraviolet information) which become a virtual (as in computerized) representation, frozen in electronic codes (Bowker & Star, 1999 and Lyon, 2007, p. 88) of an individual, assembled for the purpose of being governed, commercialized, and controlled (Haggerty & Ericson, p. 613). These data doubles are "markers for access to resources, services and power in ways which are often unknown to its referent" (p. 613). They are comprised of information which are ranked according to how useful they are in allowing institutions to discriminate (p. 614). Both corporations and the government are also profiting from this information (p. 616). In the case of credit card theft, many times the data double is treated as more believable than the victim (Lyon, 2007, p. 88).

“Surveillance depends on identification, for classification, and the identification may well be doubted, questioned or resisted by those who feel that the ‘data-double’ does not accurately represent them” (Lyon, 2007, p. 90). Many times people resist or disagree with their data-double (p. 90), peoples' identities do not always match up to the way they are identified (p. 91).

According to Bauman, adiaphorization is when "systems and processes become split off from any consideration of morality."In surveillance, this can mean the way data doubles are created which results in processing, categorization, and social sorting (Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p. 8). "The piecemail data double tends to be trusted more than the person, who prefers to tell their own tale" (p. 8). Many times the data double created through liquid surveillance is trusted more than the person itself, and those that do the sorting claim to be just dealing with data and are morally neutral (p.8) The engineers doing this database processing straddle the line of synopiticon and banopticon (p. 74).

This idea relates to Lyon's (1994) data image and computer scientist Clarke's (1994) digital persona.

According to Lyon (2003), "For one thing, the records of those organizational identities, long ago relegated to filing cabinets, seldom disturbed, are now on the move. Data doubles – various concatenations of personal data that, like it or not, represent “you” within the bureaucracy or the network – now start to flow as electrical impulses, and are vulnerable to alteration, addition, merging, and loss as they travel. For another, the ongoing life of the data doubles now depends upon complex information infrastructures" (22).

References:

"Data-doubles have far greater rates of mobility than their real-life counterparts; indeed, the travels of the one affect the travels of the other" (Lyon, 2007, p. 5).

Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bowker, G. & Star, S.L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Clarke, R. The digital persona and its application to data surveillance. The Information Society. 10(2): 77-92.

Lyon, D. (1994). The Electronic Eye:The Rise of Surveillance Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Lyon, David. 2003. “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies.” In Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, ed. David Lyon, 13-30. New York: Routledge.

Lyon, D.(2007). Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Malden: Polity Press.

Haggerty, K.D., & Ericson, R. (2000). The Surveillant Assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605-622.

Also see: Surveillant Assemblage