Oops? Interdisciplinary Stories of Sociotechnical Error| When User Consent Fails: How Platforms Undermine Data Governance

Abstract

Consent is a powerful moral force that features centrally in data governance today, often imposed as a condition for companies to collect users’ personal data. In response, an industry of consent management platforms (CMPs) has developed to administer user consent on behalf of companies complying with data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation. But CMPs do not always work as expected: technical audits reveal that CMPs often violate the conditions of legally valid consent, leading to calls for strengthening user consent. This article reinterprets such audits by applying a sociotechnical perspective to reject the facile solution of bolstering consent. Instead, I characterize CMPs as mediators that obfuscate moral relations, producing relationship errors that undermine users’ relational autonomy. This reinterpretation points to solutions that repudiate data-as-property and instead reckon with the social nature of datafication.