The two-year “Living with Personal Data: Australians’ Understandings and Practices” project was funded by the Australian Research Council and commenced in 2019. The project took a sociological approach to investigating how Australians across a wide range of social groups are living with and through their personal digital data — the digitised information that is generated when they go online, use mobile devices and apps, smart home technologies or move around in public spaces embedded with digital sensors. Conceived and commenced prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic, our focus on people’s everyday engagements with digital devices took on new meaning as our participants experienced multiple lockdowns and a ‘new normal’. As a result our analysis has examined some of the many ways that people adapted, adjusted and lived differently with data-generating technologies in 2020 and beyond. Across the project we experimented with a range of innovative methods, drawing on multisensory social, arts- and design-based research. You can read more about the project in our publications here.
Project Team
Chief Investigator: SHARP Professor Deborah Lupton, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Australia
Partner Investigator: Professor Mike Michael, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, UK
Postdoctoral Fellow: Dr Ash Watson, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Australia
LIVING WITH PERSONAL DATA 