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Paper long abstract:

The recent frenzy in discussing NSA activities and the collecting of Big Data show a widespread critical concern for the current practice of gathering and using personal data. These concerns have their history.

In an essay from 1971, the legal scholar Alan Westin had used the term 'data surveillance' to describe what he identified maybe not as a entirely novel mode of power, but - because of its scale - as a serious threat to and challenge for contemporary society (Westin 1971: 304). At that time, various media reports, popular books, scientific publications, and political hearings all of a sudden began to address contemporary practices of collecting and storing of personal data as a form of 'data surveillance'.Drawing on contemporary literary and scholarly works on these issues, I will examine how the societal usage of personal data was explored in novel normative and cultural ways by a group of scholars and in public discourse. There have been concerns about the usage of personal data before, but - as I will show in my paper - not on this broad societal level and to this extent as in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that during that time, the societal handling of (personal) data became a highly controversial matter not only of public, but also of private interest.

The empirical material of my inquiry includes mostly media reports, sociological and juridical studies from the United States and Germany during 1960s and 1970s.