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We are grateful to David Caughlin for his invaluable help in coordinating the conference in Budapest, and to the Open Society Institute and Rockefeller Foundation for their generous support of the conference. Arien Mack Editor A Note from the Conference Convenor Eastern Europe emerges from a Communist past where everything was officially “public,” privacy was unprotected, and the public sphere was etatized. The highly problematic public/private dichotomy of postmodernity is particularly complicated under conditions of postcommunism. Distortions of the public sphere (lack of transparency, skewed or monopolized public discourse ) are aggravated by attempts at penetrating into privacy in the name of public community values (in the case of abortion, for example). Transparency is denied in the name of privacy (“personality rights” of former secret police informants prevail in some countries against public interest and the rights of victims). Further , in part because of historical traditions, in many East European societies there is no genuine sense of privacy. These features are not systematically discussed in Eastern Europe. The Social Research Privacy conference at Central European University on March 23-24, 2001, helped to clarify certain crucial policy-relevant issues—for example, civic education for the development of a more responsive citizenry; data protection and access to information; the limits and responsibilities of journalism ; reproductive policies. More broadly, the conference offered a valuable point of reference and helped to put the East European issues into a global context, in terms of both prevailing influences and intellectual context. András Sajó Conference Convenor VI SOCIAL RESEARCH Spring 02 SR.4.third pages 5/8/02 10:42 PM Page vi ...

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