"The federal archive in Berlin has for the first time compiled a list of some 600,000 Jews who lived in Germany up to 1945 and were persecuted by the Nazis.
The names and addresses, which took four years to compile, will be made available to Holocaust groups to help people uncover the fate of relatives.
Archive officials from the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation said the list was not yet definitive and would require further work.
It will not be released to the public because of Germany's privacy laws, but will be passed on to museums and institutions, including Israel's national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.
"In handing over this list, we want to make a substantial contribution to documenting the loss that German Jewry suffered through persecution, expulsion and destruction," said Guenter Saathof, the head of foundation."
I'm a privacy legal expert, and it's baffling to me why German "privacy" laws would prevent this list from being published to the Internet. This is a valuable historical document. Putting it on the Internet would allow people around the world to study it. I would like to see if my grandfather is on the list. I could check if his address in Berlin was indeed correct. I think this information belongs to humanity.
Now, of course, I can imagine certain privacy issues. A very very small number of people included in the list may still be alive. Privacy laws are only meant to protect living human beings, after all, not dead people or their reputations after death. Other laws, like libel laws, can apply after death, but privacy laws cannot. So, I would call on the Foundation to publish its work on the Internet. I think it is wrong to cite "privacy" laws as a reason not to make this information public.
Because, after all, whose "privacy" are we protecting now, for a list which includes names and addresses from something like 70 years ago, and most of whom have been dead for over half a century?
This is the sort of nonsense that gives German privacy law a bad name.
3 comments:
Peter,
Of course privacy protection is for alive people and may be only some of that people are still living.
But think in their family members religion be marked on the Internet.
I do not think that the publication on the Internet is prohibited by German law. May be is a question of defining who could access the information and define an adequate privacy policy fot these data.
Good luck
The Article 29 Working Party specifically looked at the definition of 'natural persons' in their recent look at the definition of personal information. In relation to dead persons, they noted that while they are not technically covered by the EU Directive (unless the local Member State had specifically included dead persons in their definition), the Directive did give them some indirect rights. Specifically, when personal information is processed in such a way that you could not split data about dead persons from those who were living, you couldn't release the information as you would be infringing the privacy rights of those who were living. This is even more relevant when the data falls into a 'special category' or 'sensitive' category of data, which it would in this case (health, religious status etc). To even consider releasing sensitive personal data about a living person creates a number of obligations - for instance obtaining their consent or using another exemption. In practice the task would be just too hard for the Germans to try to do.
Is there any way to expunge google information of an arrest, say from a newspaper police docket, when there is no confession and the Court has ordered public records expunged?
For example, what if a college student is arrested for a drug offense and is given an ARD or Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition? There is no conviction. But the medical school he is applying to can find the arrest by googling his name? Is that something that could be corrected?
Just asking. AD
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