In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have critiqued the care-less legal and technical aspects of governments’ data disclosure of COVID-19 patients’ information. Yet, while there were many reported cases of public shaming of COVID-19 patients, not many studies have examined citizens’ usage and engagement with publicized data. In our study, we direct attention to citizens’ care-less engagement with COVID-19 patients’ data through the case study of the “Itaewon outbreak.” In May 2020, the gay community in South Korea became the target of public surveillance after it was revealed that a person who tested positive had visited a gay club in Seoul’s multicultural district Itaewon. Using the anonymized demographic and location data disclosed by the government, the news media sensationally reported on the data by highlighting the visitors’ presumed gay sexuality. In response, citizens widely circulated the data across social media by drawing on social media's popular culture of surveillance and call-outs. We describe these processes of interpreting and shaping pandemic data through social media’s participatory culture as data pop culture. To analyze data pop culture, we first examine the dominant data imaginaries cultivated through news media and government reports on pandemic data disclosure and how they inform the public’s understanding of data. Then, we examine how these dominant data imaginaries create power relations between people on social media as data owners and data objects. Lastly, we illustrate how these data imaginaries and relations become reproduced through social media popular culture and their implications.

FemTech apps have billions of users globally. Yet, despite their popularity, we know little about these apps, often developed outside controlled and regulated healthcare. While these apps have been criticised for lacking privacy and for enforcing normative ideals on women, they are often marketed in terms of female empowerment. In this presentation, we present our analysis of the empowering potential of menstruation and pregnancy apps. We ask: How do these apps represent reproductive health? What kinds of empowering qualities are present in them? Are there any aspects of the technology that (inadvertently) counteract the empowering purpose? We investigate this through a comparative design investigation using what we call critical app-walkthrough methodology together with researcher use-diaries. We show in our analysis that there are three critical ways in which these apps represent reproductive health events to users through design. We analyze; 1) interface metaphors used to represent temporality, 2) datafication of reproductive health through input and output for intimate data tracking and 3) finally the ways predictions convey certainty over uncertainty and the implications of this. From our results, we present four design sensitivities meant to inspire designers to design for other types of period tracking experiences that might better empower bleeders; support lived temporalities, embrace uncertainty, empower the self, and design less.

After the leak of the Dobbs decision that ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade, technology companies made a series of public statements in support of user privacy: Apple released an advertisement showcasing privacy features; Google promised to delete location data of abortion clinic visitors; Meta announced testing of default end-to-end-encryption. Corporations like Meta once worked to convince users that their platforms were morally neutral. Now, they publicly “crack down” on manipulation and speak out for racial justice, despite privately subjecting activists to state surveillance. To bolster their authority and popularity, platforms engage in “commodity activism,” in which corporations take positions on social issues. Ultimately, this enhances corporate capital rather than enacting social change. Care, in its ideal, is opposed to neoliberalism: resisting individuality in favor of community and refusing to reduce humans to capital. Yet, paternalistic care can be a weapon – used to ensnare and to oppress. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis of platforms’ public utterances and policy changes after the Dobbs leak, we find that platforms redefine care in three main ways. For users, care is neoliberal - platforms provide good privacy options, for which users are individually responsible. For employees, care is paternalistic - employees are offered money for healthcare, at the expense of free expression. Finally, ultimate care is for the platform - that company culture is protected, alliance with the state unthreatened, and above all, profit is promoted. Platform decisions are revealed to extend care in some ways, while also maintaining control over users and their data.

Examining the competing images, values, and purposes attached to digital health tracking platforms, this paper analyzes how platform imaginaries are constructed and negotiated in complex intersectional realities. It pursues this inquiry through a case study on how Fitbit and Apple Health have become involved in recent societal negotiations over female digital health tracking in the US. Female health tracking has a well-documented history of negotiation and contestation. Developing this case study, we build on and rethink the concept of socio-technical imaginaries. We propose to consider the articulation of platform imaginaries not as a one-sided sense-making process, but as negotiations between multiple stakeholders of which platforms are but one. This conceptual perspective allows us to analyze the construction of imaginaries as a dynamic process, open to constant renegotiation, shaped by power differences between stakeholders, and affected by the intersectional positioning of user groups within platforms. The research is operationalised through a combination of critical discourse analysis of user and platform content and walkthroughs of Fitbit and Apple Health. The analysis highlights how digital health tracking platforms have become centrally imbricated in crucial societal issues, such as female bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. And it shows how quickly platform imaginaries of female self-determination and autonomy, associated with health-tracking apps, can be overthrown and reversed.