What our health data tell American capitalism about our value—and
how that controls our lives.
Afterlives of Data follows the curious and multiple lives that
our data live once they escape our control. Mary F. E. Ebeling's
ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and
the debt that we carry becomes biopolitical assets owned by
healthcare providers, insurers, commercial data brokers, credit
reporting companies, and platforms. By delving into the oceans of
data built from everyday medical and debt traumas, Ebeling reveals
how data about our lives come to affect our bodies and our life
chances and to wholly define us.
Investigations into secretive data collection and breaches of privacy
by the likes of Cambridge Analytica have piqued concerns among many
Americans about exactly what is being done with their data. From
credit bureaus and consumer data brokers like Equifax and Experian to
the secretive military contractor Palantir, this massive industry has
little regulatory oversight for health data and works to actively
obscure how it profits from our data. In this book, Ebeling traces
the health data—medical information extracted from patients'
bodies—that are digitized and repackaged into new data commodities
that have afterlives in database lakes and oceans, algorithms, and
statistical models used to score patients on their creditworthiness
and riskiness. Critical and disturbing, Afterlives of Data
examines how Americans' data about their health and their debt are
used in the service of marketing and capitalist surveillance.