Consent In The Age of Digital Intimacy

Digital technology has radically changed the ways in which we are able to express intimate relationships with others by allowing for the permanent documentation, reproduction, and dissemination of personal and sexual experiences. While the majority of the legal literature has looked at non-consensual intimate media, consent-recording technologies, and AI-generated sexual deepfakes as individual regulatory issues, this paper asserts that they are all examples of a single broad social and legal failure. Existing legal systems continue to understand consent based on a notion of ownership, documentation, and/or technological verification, rather than seeing it as an ongoing, revocable act of personal autonomy. Using feminist legal theory and socio-legal analysis, this paper will analyse how the current legal responses to digital technology create an imbalance in favour of evidentiary certainty, proprietary interests, and platform governance over and above dignity, agency, and lived experience. It will indicate that survivors of sexual violence are required to convert the violations of their bodily autonomy into legally cognizable property or contract claims, illuminating the inadequacy of existing legal concepts to respond adequately to technology-facilitated sexual violence. This paper asserts that any meaningful reform will require a radical shift from regulating digital artefacts to protecting human dignity itself. Consent must be viewed not as a static record of events or technology but as an ongoing and evolving expression of autonomy, capable of being withdrawn at every step in the process of becoming intimate with someone.