Mary FE Ebeling is a sociologist working at the intersections of STS, feminisms, digital life, data clouds and the databased society, futurisms and alternatives.
Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt Under Capitalist Surveillance is now available online and in stores.
Afterlives of Data follows the curious and multiple lives that our data live once they escape our control. Mary F. E. Ebeling’s ethnographic investigation shows how information about our health and the debt that we carry becomes biopolitical assets owned by healthcare providers, insurers, commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies, and platforms. By delving into the oceans of data built from everyday medical and debt traumas, Ebeling reveals how data about our lives come to affect our bodies and our life chances and to wholly define us.
Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects is now available online and in stores.
This highly original book is an ethnographic noir of how Big Data profits from patient private health information.
Primarily told through a first-person noir narrative, Ebeling as a sociologist-hard-boiled-detective, investigates Big Data and the trade in private health information by examining networks of disclosure that private patient data traverses. The noir narrative reveals the processes that the data broker industry uses to create data commodities—data phantoms—or the marketing profiles of patients that are bought by advertisers to directly market to consumers.
Mary Ebeling 