Spoof, decouple, evade: The infrapolitics of data illegibility in Hong Kong

Dominant theories of data activism often emphasize making data injustice or inequality visible. Yet, across political contexts, data visibility can be empowering, but it can also create vulnerability. In this article, I analyze the situated rebalancing of data-political repertoires in Hong Kong, where declining institutional trust and perceived convergence with mainland China's digital governance have made state-led data infrastructures objects of intense suspicion. Drawing on James C. Scott's theory of infrapolitics and building on work on obfuscation, data activism and digital authoritarianism, I propose the concept of data illegibility: a repertoire of fabrication, noise, camouflage, decoupling and partial exit designed to reduce the reliability, completeness or interpretability of data captured by state or state-aligned infrastructures. Underpinned by networked vernacular critiques that rationalize and ridicule the state's data projects as instruments of total control, these contemporary tactics of everyday resistance seek to pollute, disrupt and exit the city's data infrastructures. Through digital ethnography and archival research on three cases – LeaveHomeSafe, real-name subscriber identity module registration and the electronic Hong Kong Dollar pilot – I show how data-savvy citizens, who are physically dispersed and less politically organized, asserted a right to opacity against the data assemblages of the state. Rather than public demands for representation, the article theorizes data illegibility as an uneven, costly and partial repertoire of everyday resistance that becomes especially salient when visibility is perceived less as recognition than as exposure to dataveillance and asymmetric governance.