What Databases Do to Privacy

This paper revisits the development of databases in the United States in the 1960s, along with the emergence of a public debate on the protection of privacy and personal data. It shows that, from the 1960s and even before the first digital data and their management system really existed, these issues were the subject of widespread public debate with regard to both individuals and organizations. At the time, civil society criticisms pushed the government to review its plans to merge administrative data. This paper shows that from the dawn of the 1970s, the spectacular accumulation of information in data banks was already publicly perceived as a threat to both individuals and firms.