UNPACKING EXPERTISE IN THE PRIVACY TECH INDUSTRY

Resumen

Companies that collect personal data have spent billions of dollars complying with a patchwork of global data privacy laws since 2018. In response, a nascent privacy tech industry has emerged, consisting of tech startups, consultants, investors, platforms, and domain experts that collectively help companies build compliant data governance programs. This study recognizes the key role of translating the law into software products by asking: how is expertise defined and encoded in the privacy tech industry? I draw on fieldwork from a broader ethnographic study of the privacy tech industry to identify three findings. First, the privacy tech industry constitutes a networked arena of relations structured by partitioning professional expertise across technical, legal, and operational domains. Second, technical expertise in the privacy tech industry is often tenuous and contingent, which could be strengthened by applying scrutiny and deliberation to evaluate the content of expertise rather than its performance. Third, boundaries of expertise are increasingly encoded in compliance software, perpetuating performative rather than scrutinized expertise. At scale, these products promote managerial processes that manifest as checkbox compliance, codifying splintered accountability and undermining the spirit of data privacy law. I argue that technology policy would benefit from scrutinizing the contents of expertise, inviting agonistic deliberation, and including lay expertise to counter the technocratic structural relations of a surveillance economy.