Internet Balkanization gathers pace: is privacy the real driver?

‘[W]e do not really trust the Data Acts in other countries or … we understand that there are none at all. So we feel unprotected in those countries with our data – walking down Fifth Avenue in our underwear’. Provocative exclamations of distrust have become commonplace in recent skirmishes between the EU and the USA over data privacy and trade policy. This is, however, well-trodden ground. Indeed, the statement above was made in the late 1970s by Kerstin Amer, an Under Secretary of State in the Swedish Government, as a justification for the world's first national data protection law, a statute which included a requirement that prior authorization be obtained for exports of personal data. During the 1970s and early 1980s various other countries also raised concerns about ‘data sovereignty’. Not all were European, though several appear to have been motivated by anxiety about a US hegemony that was already emerging in cross-border data services. For example, a 1972 Canadian Federal Government report entitled Computers and Privacy acknowledged that ‘as a sovereign state, Canada feels some national embarrassment and resentment over increasing quantities of often sensitive data about Canadians being stored in a foreign country’. With the benefit of hindsight, this juxtaposition of injured sovereignty and privacy concerns looks like an early example of confused thinking about data export controls. A few years later, the Brazilian Government declared its commitment “to maximize the information resources located in Brazil, declaring that ‘teleprocessing services provided by means of computers located abroad are not, in principle, used by Brazil”.’1

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.