Department of Science and Technology Studies
University College London
STS Seminar Series 2011-12
Term 2
All seminars take place on Mondays at 5.00pm
Venue: room 218 Chadwick Building, UCL
Building location:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/estates/roombooking/building-location/?id=013
All seminars are open to the public
Monday 5 March 2012
Daniel Neyland and Inga Kroener
An Ethnography of Deleting: In search of the right to be forgotten
Deletion appears to be a routine, taken for granted aspect of our
everyday lives. However, despite numerous studies of the ‘everyday,’
little close social science scrutiny has been given to the nature of
deletion. What does it mean to press delete? What happens to deleted
information? What are the consequences of deletion and for whom? The
importance of deletion as a socio-political issue has become more
pointed in recent years with increasing discussion of the ‘right to be
forgotten’. In particular, this ‘right’ has risen to prominence in
discussions and deliberations involving the re-drafting of the EU Data
Protection Act. Suggestions have been made that organisations such as
state funded surveillance systems which have traditionally stored huge
amounts of data, could switch to a default position of deleting.
However, this move to forgetting through deleting raises a range of
profound ethical and practical problems. What should be deleted and how?
In what ways would deletion impact upon security? Is deletion an ethical
step up from default storage of information? This presentation provides
an ethnographic answer to these questions. It reports on two social
scientists’ work on a project to design, build and market a new
‘ethical’ surveillance system based on default deleting of video
footage. The presentation will look at the development and testing of
this system and the role played by social scientists in assessing the
ethics of deleting.
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Dr. Chiara Ambrosio
Teaching Fellow in Philosophy of Science
Department of Science and Technology Studies
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Tel. (+44) 02076790166
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/staff/ambrosio
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/
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