Exploring digital privacy and data: powering/disempowering users-consumers

It is largely recognized that we are living in an information or knowledge society (Bell, 1976; Toffler, 1980; Lyotard, 1984; Webster, 1995; Castells, 2001; Mattelart 2003). This post-industrial society is characterized by the fact that information has become its foremost commodity. The emergence and rapid diffusion of ICTs - and the Internet in particular - has contributed to the multiplication of available data, by facilitating its production and transmission. Nearly all sectors of society are submerged by information, relevant and useful or not. Quantity does not equal quality. The need for appropriate data management techniques becomes crucial. Tim Berners Lee rightly considers that "data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it". The digitalization of our environment has without a doubt opened the door to important changes. The ambition of the workshop is to find a middle way between revolutionary prophecies and a dramatized disenchantment: the objective is to examine the impact of large amounts of available digitized data indifferent contexts and the way in which social actors use it in a variety of settings: for political activism, within the biomedical sector, to organize knowledge and through the practices of online journalism. A common question guides the discussion: always more data, but how to make sense out of it?