Haunting data: Mental health, data-hacking and digital temporalities

This article maps the experiences of victims of the Vastaamo psychotherapy centre data hack by analysing their stories through a lens provided by the digital hauntology framework. The article views the data-hacking incident as a form of terror that continues to weigh on the victims in several ways, including by giving birth to new forms of harm and injury. The data consist of anonymous written narratives collected via the digital tool Penna (N = 100). I discuss and analyse the leaked data, in all their liveliness and with their own multitemporal (after)lives, as both haunted and haunting. While disparate sites of trauma can haunt each other, datafication also carries with it distinct particularities, which stresses the transformations in the practices of memory and forgetting in the digital age. Such practices carry the potential for digital archives to revitalise data: in the case of a data breach, personal data generated in the past may continue to haunt the victims in future, in various ways. The article provides insights into the ways in which digital temporalities entangle with the affective experiences of mental (ill-)health. It argues that the digital age provides entangled and networked sites for recurrent wounding, thus ultimately generating a form of affective inequality. Many victims register the Vastaamo data breach and its aftermath as a loss of the ontological and epistemological certainty and security that previously provided an experience of being psychically held.