Overview
Surveys the various attitudes and debates on centralised registration from the wartime population register to the 1984 Data Protection Act
Examines the context in which Margaret Thatcher’s government passed the 1984 Data Protection Act
Explores how the issues discussed in this period leading up to the Data Protection Act are still relevant to current debates on personal data
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book examines the fraught political relationship between British governments, which wanted information about peoples’ lives, and the people who desired privacy. To do this it looks at something that Britain only experienced in wartime, a centralized and up-to-date list of everyone in the country: a population register. The abolition of this wartime system is contrasted with later attempts to reintroduce registration, and the change in the political mind-set driving these later schemes to develop centralised webs of so-called objective data is examined. These policies were confronted by privacy campaigns, studied here, but it is shown how government responses succeeded in turning political debates about data into technical discussions about computerization; thus protecting its data, largely on paper, from oversight. This reformulation also shaped the 1984 Data Protection Act, which consequently did not protect privacy but rather increased government’s ability to gain knowledge of, and hence power over, the people.
Authors and Affiliations
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Population Registers and Privacy in Britain, 1936—1984
Authors: Kevin Manton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02753-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-02752-0Published: 23 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-02753-7Published: 11 December 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 232
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, Political History, Social History, Legal History, History of Modern Europe