From Vulnerable Data Subjects to Vulnerabilizing Data Practices: Navigating the Protection Paradox in AI-Based Analyses of Platformized Lives
Authors: Delfina S. Martinez Pandiani, Ella Streefkerk, Laurens Naudts, Paula Helm
Organizations: University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany · KU Leuven, Belgium
Abstract
This paper traces a conceptual shift from understanding vulnerability as a static, essentialized property of data subjects to examining how it is actively enacted through data practices. Unlike reflexive ethical frameworks focused on missing or counter-data, we address the condition of abundance inherent to platformized life-a context where a near inexhaustible mass of data points already exists, shifting the ethical challenge to the researcher's choices in operating upon this existing mass. We argue that the ethical integrity of data science depends not just on who is studied, but on how technical pipelines transform "vulnerable" individuals into data subjects whose vulnerability can be further precarized. We develop this argument through an AI for Social Good (AI4SG) case: a journalist's request to use computer vision to quantify child presence in monetized YouTube 'family vlogs' for regulatory advocacy. This case reveals a "protection paradox": how data-driven efforts to protect vulnerable subjects can inadvertently impose new forms of computational exposure, reductionism, and extraction. Using this request as a point of departure, we perform a methodological deconstruction of the AI pipeline to show how granular technical decisions are ethically constitutive. We contribute a reflexive ethics protocol that translates these insights into a reflexive roadmap for research ethics surrounding platformized data subjects. Organized around four critical junctures-dataset design, operationalization, inference, and dissemination-the protocol identifies technical questions and ethical tensions where well-intentioned work can slide into renewed extraction or exposure. For every decision point, the protocol offers specific prompts to navigate four cross-cutting vulnerabilizing factors: exposure, monetization, narrative fixing, and algorithmic optimization. Rather than uncritically...
We present an ethnographic study of an alternative approach to data work, developed by a civic-tech initiative that builds datasets for training and benchmarking online safety systems. They aim to respond to online safety concerns from a feminist perspective, by building safety datasets collaboratively with those most impacted by online harms. In this paper, we examine how this approach aims to reorient data work as a site for repair and redress, and trace the struggles they encounter in the process. Specifically, we draw attention to the challenges and tensions involved in advancing just reward for data work and collective governance of AI datasets. Examining these challenges through an STS-informed lens of reparative justice and repair, we argue that the work of repairing data work (and AI) lies, fundamentally, in resetting the ties of accountability. At a time heightened emphasis on efforts like safety evaluations and red teaming to make AI more responsible, we highlight the need to confront foundational questions about how the humans involved in these efforts relate to the datasets and systems they help produce. A reparative lens demands that we interrupt prevailing norms of data work and place at their centre, not AI or datasets, but those most harmed by the neglect, oversight and exclusion animated in the current modes of dataset production. This, we argue, offers a bold vision for responsibility and contributes towards a critical agenda for building alternative futures of data and AI practice.
Ethical governance of AI-driven systems is often expressed through high-level principles and static documentation, creating a gap between regulatory requirements and system-level verification. This challenge is particularly acute in digital phenotyping, where continuous behavioural data raises concerns around consent, privacy, and fairness. In this paper, we propose a computational ethical framework for AI-driven digital phenotyping system in which ethical requirements are formalised as deontic temporal logic constraints, alongside a conceptual ethical agent that oversees the system and ensures that any supervised system satisfies the specified constraints. Using a case study involving financial data and mental health, we model key ethical properties and verify them using the Z3 Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver. Our evaluation shows that the framework is logically consistent and that violations of the specified ethical properties are ruled out within the formal model through counterexample-based verification. This presents early research enabling continuous, machine-verifiable ethical checking, moving beyond retrospective compliance based on static documentation. We discuss limitations, including the need for real-world verification with data, the challenge with subjectivity and contextual sensitivity, the need for human oversight, and outline how such approaches can support the development of digital phenotyping and AI systems with continuous and auditable ethical guarantees.
Oluwadara Adedeji, Michael Mayowa Farayola, Jeff Brozena +3
To better assist users with completing challenging tasks, AI agents mediate communications, access data, and interact with different APIs. Many employers (and even nation-states) already provide their users with this technology. However, widespread adoption of AI agents creates a new risk to abuse access to user data for another goal: surveilling users. These users might not even have the ability or permission to control the actions and data accesses of the surveilling agents. We introduce and formalize the problem of agentic surveillance: the ability of an AI agent to analyze available information, craft a report, and send it out using available tools. To evaluate surveillance capabilities across different models, we create SurveilBench, a dataset of various reporting scenarios focusing on three domains: corporate, education, and police. We find that some models exhibit emergent (i.e., unprompted) tendencies to help surveillance, but they also report the attempts to surveil users to the government. Finally, we repurpose prompt injections for evading surveillance and develop three evasion techniques that hide from, deceive, or induce over-escalation in surveillance agents. We conclude that agentic surveillance can already be easily implemented and, therefore, call for a comprehensive technical, ethical, and legislative framework to protect users.