More-than-human rights to data

Digitalization is continuously demanding new, or revitalized, rights. Recently, this can be seen in calls for privacy rights or data subjects’ rights to control ‘their’ data. In parallel to this development, there are also both theoretical and activist developments to expand the notion of rights all together, beyond a human/ist understanding of rights, into ‘more-than-human’ rights. In this chapter, it is outlined what a more-than-human rights concept could entail for data rights. To do so, a Deleuzian-Spinozan idea of rights is explored in connection with new materialist philosophies in general and new materialist media studies in particular. To conclude, it is suggested that a more layered understanding of the different elements producing, and sustaining, data, is needed to invoke more-than-human rights to data.