Feminist Data Manifest-No

The Feminist Data Manifest-No is not a checklist telling institutions how to make their existing data collection more “ethical.” It places refusal beside commitment to ask how data regimes produce risk, normalize bodies and turn lived experience into a resource for extraction. Marika Cifor and Patricia Garcia led the drafting; the first complete draft was collective work with TL Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland, Anita Say Chan, Jennifer Rode, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, Niloufar Salehi and Lisa Nakamura. The official citation dates the work to 2019. That collaborative credit is part of its argument: feminist data ethics is not a single expert setting rules for everyone else.

One of the declaration’s central moves is to refuse the idea that data is an abstract substance detached from bodies. Data is produced through relationships and institutions, and can carry differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and nationality into systems of classification and surveillance. The Manifest-No therefore challenges the assumption that risk means the same thing for everyone, and questions the use of transparency or technical complexity as an excuse to evade responsibility. Its demand is not only that a system become explainable. It asks who defines the problem, who can interpret the data, who bears the consequences of error, and when information should stop being retained or used.

Its most practical—and difficult—question is whether “no” can be a real option. Refusing tracking, data disclosure or automated services may be unsafe for some people: when welfare, education, work or health care is conditional on data consent, opting out can mean losing a necessary resource. Refusal is therefore neither a transfer of responsibility to individual users nor a pursuit of purity outside every institution. The text also commits to entering compromised spaces such as academia and industry in order to unsettle their power relations. The tension is productive: where people cannot freely exit, refusal requires collective organization, alternatives and accountable institutional change—not merely a privacy button.

As a reading tool for research or product design, the Manifest-No suggests three questions: whose lives do the data describe, who helped shape those descriptions, and does consent include an understandable choice, a revocable permission and meaningful refusal? It does not prescribe one technical standard for every community, or claim that all data must be destroyed. It insists that retention and analysis carry relational responsibilities. Read it beside Feminist Principles of the Internet — Version 2.0: one foregrounds internet rights and governance, while the other brings refusal into data practice and institutional accountability. The official Manifest-No site provides the full declaration, collaborators and preferred citation; the University of Washington publication record lists the authors and 2019 publication year.