Digital cultural heritage, such as photographs, audio or video recordings, public records, or private documents, often contains personal data on living individuals. European data protection law therefore has an important effect on what kind of personal data are preserved, made available, or disseminated as part of digital heritage. This talk explores European data protection law, in particular the EU General Data Protection Regulation, as legal governance of collective memory. I analyse how data protection law affects the contents of informational resources about the past and how it shapes the relations between different mnemonic actors, such as individuals, researchers, the media, or cultural heritage institutions. I argue that in addition to empowering individuals as mnemonic actors through the ‘right to be forgotten’, EU data protection law also recognises and reinforces the positions of institutionalised heritage actors. In this way, EU data protection law has gained an increasingly important role in defining which aspects of the past are worth remembering and who gets to decide this.

Speaker: Riikka Lönnblad, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law

Image: Charter and Seal by Paxton, Katherine, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, CC BY