Politics of Personal Information
Product details
- ISBN 9781789209464
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Dec 2020
- Publisher: Berghahn Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the 1970s and 1980s West Germany was a pioneer in both the use of the new information technologies for population surveillance and the adoption of privacy protection legislation. During this era of cultural change and political polarization, the expansion, bureaucratization, and computerization of population surveillance disrupted the norms that had governed the exchange and use of personal information in earlier decades and gave rise to a set of distinctly postindustrial social conflicts centered on the use of personal information as a means of social governance in the welfare state. Combining vast archival research with a groundbreaking theoretical analysis, this book gives a definitive account of the politics of personal information in West Germany at the dawn of the information society.
Larry Frohman is an Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York. He is the author of Poor Relief and Welfare in Germany from the Reformation to World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2008), along with a series of articles on the welfare state.
