Whiteness in and through data protection: An intersectional approach to anti-violence apps and #MeToo bots

Abstract

This article analyses apps and artificial intelligence chatbots designed to offer survivors of sexual violence with emergency assistance, education, and a means to report and build evidence against perpetrators. Demonstrating how these technologies both confront and constitute forms of oppression, this analysis complicates assumptions about data protection through an intersectional feminist examination of these digital tools. In surveying different anti-violence apps, we interrogate how the racial formation of whiteness manifests in ways that can be understood as the political, representational, and structural intersectional dimensions of data protection.