Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty

By Aynne Kokas

A deep dive into China’s accumulation and movement of consumer data and what that means for the future of global digital sovereignty

We live in an age when, with each tap on our smartphone, companies gather ever-richer profiles of us as customers. They know what we like, whom we connect to, where we are, what’s on our devices, what our private desires are. Increasingly, they can harvest insights about us that even our most intimate contacts don’t know.

In Trafficking Data, media studies professor Aynne Kokas reveals the afterlife of this extracted data. Kokas argues that US complacency – government leadership failures, Silicon Valley’s disruption fetish and Wall Street’s addiction to growth – has yielded an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather citizens’ data and traffic it to China and, by extension, to the Chinese government.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in the United States and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data reveals how the minutiae of daily life, whether online dating, playing video games or mixing brownies in a smart connected food mixer, contribute to China’s acquiring unique access to US data – and what that means for the future of global power.