Browsing by Subject "Platform studies"
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Item Data friction and infrastructural platform power : an analysis of Apple’s iOS 14 privacy updates(2023-04-21) Woodward, Emily, Ph. D.; Strover, Sharon; Straubhaar, JosephWhen Apple announced the arrival of iOS 14.5 in early 2021, the company’s new App Tracking Transparency data tracking limitations made headlines for its potential to destabilize the digital economy. Platform companies have accumulated unprecedented social, economic, and political power over the course of the last two decades, and the collection and processing of data have been central to their rise. However, successive scandals and challenges to this model have increasingly put corporate data practices at the center of debates on reforming the digital sphere. Considered alongside users’ growing data privacy concerns and efforts by a rising number of countries to pass serious data protection legislation, Apple’s privacy proposals can arguably be seen as part of a broader fracturing of support for the model commonly referred to as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ This thesis argues that the production of ‘data friction’ constitutes an emerging lever of platform power, one which is particularly salient for platforms fulfilling an infrastructural role within the broader digital media environment. Drawing insights from media studies scholarship on platform studies and datafication, as well as from the Science and Technology Studies tradition of infrastructure studies, Apple’s iOS is framed as an infrastructural platform which plays a mediating role between app developers and end-users on devices used for everyday activity. Taking a multi-method approach through a Critical Discourse Analysis and socio-technical walkthrough, this study examines how data friction operates within the context of the mobile iOS platform. This study finds that Apple catalyzes data friction by positioning its iOS 14 privacy features as an intervention which: 1) promotes user choice, control, and transparency 2) equalizes power asymmetries within the ‘data industrial complex.’ Ultimately, these data friction mechanisms serve to both leverage and reinforce Apple’s role as an infrastructural platform and mediating force in the broader digital media ecosystem.