Spoof, decouple, evade
The infrapolitics of data illegibility in Hong Kong
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24217830 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tin-Yuet Ting (0000-0002-2100-7995, Hong Kong Polytechnic University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Big Data & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/20539517261494677 |
| OpenAlex | W7214976832 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
Dominant theories of data activism often emphasize making data injustice or inequality visible. Yet, across political contexts, data visibility can be empowering, but it can also create vulnerability. In this article, I analyze the situated rebalancing of data-political repertoires in Hong Kong, where declining institutional trust and perceived convergence with mainland China's digital governance have made state-led data infrastructures objects of intense suspicion. Drawing on James C. Scott's theory of infrapolitics and building on work on obfuscation, data activism and digital authoritarianism, I propose the concept of data illegibility: a repertoire of fabrication, noise, camouflage, decoupling and partial exit designed to reduce the reliability, completeness or interpretability of data captured by state or state-aligned infrastructures. Underpinned by networked vernacular critiques that rationalize and ridicule the state's data projects as instruments of total control, these contemporary tactics of everyday resistance seek to pollute, disrupt and exit the city's data infrastructures. Through digital ethnography and archival research on three cases – LeaveHomeSafe, real-name subscriber identity module registration and the electronic Hong Kong Dollar pilot – I show how data-savvy citizens, who are physically dispersed and less politically organized, asserted a right to opacity against the data assemblages of the state. Rather than public demands for representation, the article theorizes data illegibility as an uneven, costly and partial repertoire of everyday resistance that becomes especially salient when visibility is perceived less as recognition than as exposure to dataveillance and asymmetric governance.
data activism · data infrastructure · data visibility · dataveillance · decoupling · digital authoritarianism · digital governance · everyday resistance · Hong Kong · infrapolitics · institutional trust · James C. Scott · Obfuscation · COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Smart Cities and Technologies
Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media
The Costs of Connection
The Data Revolution
China's Social Credit System
Making a Scene via Counter-Data Mapping
Cartographies of Resistance
Extra-activism
Data witnessing
The Right to Erasure in EU Data Protection Law
Algorithms of Resistance
Obfuscation
Dreamscapes of Modernity
Environmental data as a relational mediator of contentious publicness
Contesting data power at the margins
Mundane citizenship on the move
Doxxing as discursive action in a social movement
From Open Data to “Grounded Openness”
Big Data from the South(s)
Media Self-Censorship in a Self-Censoring Society
Data as a Weapon
The social impact of open government data in Hong Kong
Surveillance in China’s Xinjiang Region
Poetics of relation
Civil society organizations under rapid democratic backsliding
President XI's Surveillance State
Liberation Technology
From ‘be water’ to ‘be fire
What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally
Data arenas
Adaptation and Resilience
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |