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1 Remembering (to) Delete: Forgetting Beyond Informational Privacy

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Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age

Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 38))

Abstract

Much has been penned over the last half decade or so on the pervasiveness and persistency of digital memory. With reportedly more than ten million photos uploaded to Facebook every single hour by one of its more than a billion users, large online platforms have become global repositories of digital memories. This has sparked an increasing number of cases, in which individuals have been harmed by digital memories. Whether it is old “mug shots” of prison inmates that are easily searchable online long after criminal records have been officially expunged, the off-the-cuff utterance about one’s job that travels back to one’s supervisor, or the stupid online comment that suddenly ends relationships, many thousands by now have been burned by digital memories about them. At times, even analog memories are digitized, visualized and popularized about one’s relatively minor transgressions decades ago, as a German minister of higher education discovered (before she had to resign).

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Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2018). 1 Remembering (to) Delete: Forgetting Beyond Informational Privacy. In: Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 38. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90230-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90230-2_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90229-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90230-2

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