The Development of Consent to Computing

The origins and transformation of digital consent are recounted in a comparative fashion, focusing on political constructions of computing in Western countries, regional bodies, and global negotiations. When data protection regimes emerged to govern computing technologies in the 1970s, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, and Sweden all ignored consent, but for very different reasons, and structured the governance of computers in related but diverse ways. Germany's unique construction of computing as a particular moral act that required consent would later find an interesting bedfellow with the U.S., which had relied heavily on transparency as a policy tool, as national systems gave way to international entities establishing rules for telematics, transnational data flows, and a newly individualized computer revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. This work contributes to a growing body of work on both the history of globalized communication and the legal history of computing.