Do Users Even Care If Reused Smart Garments Reveal Earlier Users' Data?: Anticipating Privacy Implications in the Circular Economy

Smart garments and circular-economy endeavours nurture imaginaries of sustainable futures. However, these trends’ intersection involves privacy risks: when the smart garments are recycled, their biometric data should be erased, to protect earlier users’ privacy. Unfortunately, this data erasure may not always occur. To examine privacy perceptions connected with reused smart garments, we conducted a two-week speculative enactment, preceded with systemic future scenario development. Eight participants wore a reused smart shirt prototype that seemed to leak a prior user’s data. The participants initially disregarded privacy problems associated with smart-garment reuse but changed their perceptions upon recognising risks of surveillance and of private data’s disclosure to the garment’s future users. Discussing the systemic future scenarios with participants spotlighted implications for future privacy related to data ownership, the digital divide, and environmental authoritarianism. These findings call for anticipatory approaches that heighten sensitivity to uncertainty and implicit assumptions in researching privacy in possible futures.