For many people, going through pregnancy is a complex experience and full of different emotions.
Most of them are public since once the belly enlarges and becomes noticeable, the wish of relativesfriends and even strangers to touch it and make comments about it seems irresistible… but will it be possible to hide a pregnancy from the omnipresent digital surveillance on the Internet?
The magazine editor The New Yorker Jia Tolentino wanted to know how long she could go without her phone knowing she was expecting her second child.
So, in addition to delete unnecessary applications and removing geolocation permissions, he avoided searching Google for information or articles about babies.
He also did not buy anything related in electronic stores, did not use his credit card for medications nor followed pregnancy or maternity accounts on Instagram.
Of the twenty pregnancy tracking apps, 15 sell the data they collect, including IP address, sexual history and medical details.
This unusual challenge is not new. Ten years ago, technology sociologist Janet Vertesi tried it, who was surprised at the time by the voracity of companies for power. identify pregnant women and reach them in a personalized way with marketing.
And this is one of the most relevant types of consumers: they can buy up to twice as many items, and their decisions, such as the brand of diaper or where to buy children’s clothing, create habits that are maintained over time.
But in 2024, having control of our information seems like a utopia: states and companies can access complete reports of our online consumption, from the history of sites we visit to the clicks we make, and there are profiles created with our tastes in TV, movies and music.
It is believed that people currently generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day globally.
And this data is so precious that it has become a currency. In 2022, the Mozilla Foundation discovered that of the twenty pregnancy tracking apps most popular for smartphones, 15 sold the data they collected, including IP address, sexual history and medical details.
The same thing happened with apps to record moments of fertility.
After several weeks without Instagram or any app showing her pregnancy ads or messages, Tolentino declared herself the winner of the challenge and started using his phone the way he really wanted to.
As he revealed in a chronicle, he felt relief, because avoiding constant supervision required effort and had operational difficulties that made their daily lives difficult.
Not for nothing did Shoshana Zuboff baptize the system in which we live “surveillance capitalism”, a new economic order that demands the human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sale.
As the journalist Simone Stolzoff mentioned, experiments like Tolentino’s lead us to rethink how we are under constant scrutiny.
However, it doesn’t seem to worry us that much: we accept cookies from pages we visit and we give away data in exchange for free WiFi while we have a coffee at the trendy bar.
