Abstract
Amalgamating the languages of scientific and literary approaches, this essay is meant to establish a common thread that runs through the separate topics of data protection literature—a leitmotif centered on the issues of remembering and forgetting, if you will.
As the chapter’s subtitle suggests, my intention has been to present my views in a format that is decidedly different from the standard style of academic writing. Amalgamating the languages of scientific and literary approaches, the chapter is meant to establish a common thread that runs through the separate topics of data protection literature—a leitmotif centered on the problematics of remembering and forgetting, if you will. As a result, readers will not find any numbered sections, bullet points, footnotes or end notes which would hinder the continuity of reading. There is, however, an annotated reference list at the end.
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References
Below is a list of the more important direct and indirect references, arranged in the actual order of their occurrence:
Lessig, Lawrence. 2000. Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. (Lessig’s best-seller, in which he expounds his view on how code becomes law in information societies.)
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage. (The originator of the concept of reflexive or second modernity wrote his classic treatise on risk society as early as 1986.)
Fuchs, Christian. 2011. Critique of the political economy of Web 2.0 surveillance. In Internet and surveillance: The challenge of Web 2.0 and social media, ed. Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval, 31–70. New York: Routledge. (The author, who applied Marxist ideas to the world of Internet, made an ambitious attempt to develop the political economy of Web 2.0.)
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Funes, the Memorius. In Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones, 107–126. New York: Grove Press. (A famous 1942 short story capturing the short life of the Uruguayan mnemonist; analyzed by Draaisma; see further below!)
Luria, Alexander Romanovich. 1968. The mind of a Mnemonist: A little book about a vast memory. New York: Basic Books. (Writing about Solomon Shereshevsky, who is referred to in the book as “S,” Luria, the prominent Soviet neurologist, describes the numerous experiments he carried out for many years between the two World Wars.)
Draaisma, Douwe. 2004. Why life speeds up as you get older. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. (Revealing a strong empathy for the various theories of memory, a remarkable book by the famous Dutch psychologist and historian of psychology.)
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. 2009. Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton/Woodstock: Princeton Univ. Press. (While not being the first to address the problem, the author produced the first book with a comprehensive argumentation about the need as well as the difficulties of forgetting.)
Bentham, Jeremy. 1995. Panopticon, or the inspection-house (1787). Its modern edition: The panopticon writings, ed. Miran Bozovic, 29–95. London: Verso. (Originally put forward by Foucault, this proposition became the classic metaphor of the surveillance society.)
Székely, Iván. 2010. Kukkoló társadalom—avagy van-e még függöny a virtuális ablakunkon? [“Voyeur Society—Does Our Virtual Window Still Have a Curtain?”] In Az internet a kockázatok és mellékhatások tekintetében [The Internet, with regard to possible hazards and side-effects], ed. Judit Talyigás, 93–120. Budapest: Scolar [In Hungarian]. (My study on voyeur society for the above publication.)
Feeley, Michael M., and Jonathan Simon. 1992. The new penology: Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications. Criminology 30:449–474. (A much-cited sourcebook of the new school of penology.)
PRIME and PrimeLife. Privacy and Identity Management for Europe: a project supported by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science, and PrimeLife: Bringing sustainable privacy and identity management to future networks and services, a research project funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme. (These web sites make available documents from the first and second phase of the development of a comprehensive user-centric identity management system.) http://www.prime-project.eu, and http://www.primelife.eu. Accessed 6 December 2011.
Brands, Stefan. 2000. Private credentials: Zero-knowledge systems, Inc., November 2000. http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/crypto-research/anon/www.freedom.net/products/whitepapers/credsnew.pdf.Accessed 6 December 2011. (One of the author’s earliest expositions of the system of private credentials.)
Nooteboom, Cees. 1983. Rituals. Baton Rouge: LSU Press. (The original source of the earlier-quoted metaphor of memory.)
BROAD. Broadening the Range of Awareness in Data protection: a project supported by by the Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Commission. (The homepage of the BROAD project.) http://www.broad-project.eu. Accessed 6 December 2011.
Wells, Herbert George. 1938. World brain. London: Meuthuen & Co. Ltd. (A highly visionary piece of early sci-fi about the world brain.)
Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmel. 2007. A digital life. Scientific American 296:58–65. (A description of the ideology behind MyLifeBits, a tool that records everything.)
Armengo, Roberto, Kent Wayland, and Priscilla Regan. 2010. Facebook funhouse: Notes on personal transparency and peer surveillance. Paper presented at the fourth Biannual Surveillance and Society/SSN conference, April 13–15. London, UK. (A presentation given by the researchers who originally proposed the House of Mirrors metaphor—for the moment still only in highlights.)
Parliamentary Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information. 1998. Recommendation on the microfilm recording of documents containing personal data relating to the persecution of Jews during the Nazi period, and on their transfer to the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. In The first three years of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, ed. László Majtányi. Budapest: Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information. (An analysis of conflicts between the legitimate purposes of unveiling historical events and the privacy rights of the victims of history.) http://www.osaarchivum.org/publications/accessandprotection/. Accessed 6 December 2011.
A történelemben lesz egy lyuk [“There Will Be a Hole in History”]. 2003. In E-világi beszélgetések.hu [E-World Conversations.hu], ed. Judit Talyigás. Budapest: Peszto Kiadó [In Hungarian]. (A conversation with me, originally conducted for a collection of interviews with the main contributors to the establishment of the Hungarian information society.)
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Szekely, I. (2012). The Right to Forget, the Right to be Forgotten. In: Gutwirth, S., Leenes, R., De Hert, P., Poullet, Y. (eds) European Data Protection: In Good Health?. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2903-2_17
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