Trafficking Data by Aynne Kokas

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A deep dive into China’s accumulation and movement of consumer data and what that means for the future of global digital sovereignty.

We live in an age when, with each tap on our smartphone, companies gather ever-richer profiles of us as customers. They know what we like, who we connect to, where we are, what’s on our devices, what our private desires are. Increasingly, they can harvest insights about us that even our most intimate contacts don’t know.

In TRAFFICKING DATA, the University of Virginia media studies professor Aynne Kokas reveals the afterlife of this extracted data. Kokas argues that US complacency – government leadership failures, Silicon Valley’s disruption fetish, and Wall Street’s addiction to growth – has yielded an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather citizens’ data and traffic it to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in the United States and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, TRAFFICKING DATA reveals how the minutiae of daily life, whether online dating, playing video games, or mixing brownies in a connected mixer, contribute to China’s acquiring unique access to US data – and what that means for the future of global power.

AYNNE KOKAS is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and a senior faculty fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. For over 20 years she has researched trade between the US and Chinese markets as a management consultant, professor, Fulbright scholar, and employee of Fortune 500 companies. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, BBC World News, the Financial Times, Slate and Bloomberg, among other outlets, and she has written opinion pieces for the Washington Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. She is the author of HOLLYWOOD MADE IN CHINA (University of California Press, 2017), which won multiple awards including the Chinese American Librarian Association Best Book Award and the Next Generation Indie Non-Fiction Book Award. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Agent: Tisse Takagi

Publisher: Oxford University Press Delivery: January 2022 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Proposal and sample chapters Length: 80,000 words

All rights available excluding World English (Oxford University Press)