Balder Ex-Libris

Authors : Rule James B. - Greenleaf Graham
Title : Global privacy protection The first generation
Year : 2008

Link download : Rule_James_B_-_Greenleaf_Graham_-_Global_privacy_protection.zip

Introduction. James B. Rule. Public issues are like living creatures. They have life-cycles – beginnings, middles and (eventually) ends. Issues are typically the offspring of non-issues: things that people once considered trivial, normal or inevitable, but which they redefine as unacceptable, even intolerable, and susceptible to change. Very often these transitions into issue-hood are the work of social movements that publicize and condemn what they hold to be scandalous conditions – as in the public definition of sexual harassment as a condition requiring remedial action in law and policy. Other issues ‘just grow’, as people come to agree even without exhortation that certain conditions, perhaps of long standing, are no longer acceptable. Whatever their origins, public issues are defined by their contested nature – their acknowledged status as matters on which people have to take stands for or against change. This book traces the birth and early history of privacy, and the need for its protection, as a public issue. Privacy is an inexact term, one that gets applied to a variety of related concerns. We focus here on controversies over the fate of personal data held by government and private institutions in conventional or computerized files. Since roughly the 1960s, such privacy concerns have risen to the state of issue-hood in virtually all the world’s democracies. At stake are such questions as what personal information institutions may collect, where and how it can be stored, who can gain access to it, and what actions can be taken on its basis. Spurring these concerns has been the growing realization that such files have potentially sweeping consequences for the lives of those depicted in them. People’s records direct the attentions of law enforcement authorities; shape consumers’ access to credit and insurance; guide the search for suspected terrorists; help determine our tax liabilities; shape the medical care and social welfare benefits that we receive – and on and on. In a world where one’s records count for more and more, in terms of the treatment one receives from major institutions, questions of what practices should govern creation and use of such records were all but inevitable. It was the growing conviction that these consequential processes require active attention and response in law and policy that transformed privacy into a public issue. ...