Gitika Saksena

Gitika Saksena

Director, LagomWorks Consulting

Gitika has over 15 years’ experience across applicative research, organization consulting, design thinking, and talent strategy. She is currently based in Delhi, India. LagomWorks is an applied anthropology and ethnographic research-led design and innovation consulting firm that has partnered with organisations, universities, incubators, and social enterprises across India, the Middle East, and the EU. Prior to LagomWorks, Gitika was a Vice President at Accenture Technology in India, where she led the strategy for various talent initiatives.

Gitika’s research interests lie in the areas of STS, entrepreneurship, digital anthropology and visual anthropology. She has co-presented research papers at recent academic and industry conferences, including EPIC 2020, RAI Film Festival 2021, and ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK) 2021.

Gitika completed her second Masters’ degree, with Distinction, in Social Anthropology from SOAS University of London on a British Chevening scholarship. In addition, she has an MBA from Xavier Institute of Management – Bhubaneswar, India and a graduate degree in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, India.

Negotiating the universal narratives on data privacy

Situated in the phenomenological experiences of a contact tracing app in India, this talk questions the universality of narratives on data privacy. In response to national/ transnational discourses, ethnographic research carried out among respondents in the city of Delhi suggests that personal data is not uniformly viewed as a valuable or as private property, especially when situated as a trace among millions of records. There is a stated acceptance of these personal traces as a public good, provided it is used meaningfully.

Furthermore, the respondents privilege aspects such as data storage and servers instead, where data being secure within the territorial sovereignty of the country is a key concern. In context of these insights, this talk revisits the assemblages — of app, data, networks, servers, mobile, battery et al — that inform the negotiation (instead of resistance) with contact tracing apps and thus, necessitate an exploration beyond debates of data privacy. These proffer important considerations for design and impact of these technology interventions.

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