Afterlives of Data

What our health data tells American capitalism about our value—and how it controls our lives.

Afterlives of Data follows the curious and multiple lives that our data live once they escape us. Mary F. E. Ebeling’s ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and the debt we carry become 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 control 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 follows the afterlives of health data—medical information extracted from patients’ bodies, digitised and repackaged into new data commodities—that go on to live in database lakes and oceans, algorithms, and statistical models used to score patients on their creditworthiness and riskiness. Afterlives of Data is a critical and disturbing narrative that examines how Americans’ data about their health and their debt are used in the service of marketing and capitalist surveillance.