Citizen Awakening of the Data Subject?
In the wake of controversies over the census, Facebook and others
Saturday, I cleaned the house while listening to a lecture by sociologist Saskia Sassen on the evolving concept of citizenship in a globalizing world recorded for the Big Ideas show (mp3, video). The conference focused on the multiple micro changes that globalization causes in the definition and experience of citizenship (or of the political subjectivity, in other words).
Sassen reminds us that while we tend to experience citizenship as an unitary condition, in fact citizenship is made of a whole bundle of components. At the heart of citizenship, there is a bundle of formal rights that are recognized by State. But there are as well around many other social elements that might not derive from our connection to the State (such as the physical environment of the city vs. the countryside). So one can unbundle citizenship to look as how each of these elements emerges, changes and disappears; thus how the whole idea of citizenship is evolving as a result.
This idea brought me back to that of a citizen awakening as data subject. A theme that corresponds to a wish I expressed as early as in 1988 in my contribution to the book Human Rights in Canada: Into the 1990s and Beyond.[1] Sassen’s lecture called this question to me: are we now also witnessing this historic micro change of the addition of the status of data subject into the consciousness of contemporary citizen? (more…)
Par-delà la vie privée: ce que tout juriste devrait savoir sur les applications des technologies de l’information et des communications concernant les personnes physiques
«Par delà la vie privée : ce que tout juriste devrait savoir sur les applications des technologies de l’information et des communications concernant les personnes physiques», Actes de la XIVe Conférence des Juristes de l’État. Cowansville, Québec: Les Éditions Yvon Blais, 2000, 133-148.
Abstract:
This communication organizes itself around a single message: the need to look beyond legal analysis of information technology and communications (ICT) applications involving individuals solely in terms of privacy related rights; or, in other words, the need to see that these devices operate, well beyond the scope of this concept, in a multidimensional reality, often of a complex nature. This text therefore presents facts and arguments in support of a particular approach to the relationship between law, on the one hand, and ICT, on the other. This approach is the result, as much of empirical field work than of historical and theoretical examinations. A set of means to ensure a better assessment of ICT application projects will be presented.
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