Questions of data, law, feminism and the environment are not new, and contrary to popular perceptions, were not discovered as a field of critical thought by contemporary scholars. These debates were already taking place in national and international fora in the 1960s and the 1970s. Among the most prolific European figures in those pioneering discussions, stood out the feminist, environmentalist, and critical thinker of computers, data and their relation with power, Kerstin Anér.

Kerstin Anér (1920-1991) was a Swedish author, politician, advocate, literary critic, and much more – a ground-breaking public intellectual who, inter alia, was actively involved in shaping the first national data protection law ever in 1973. Since then, however, her name appears to have been almost erased from European collective memory. She was a prominent public figure in data protection law and policy debates in her own time, but Anér and her work – both its scope and material findings – have for the most part descended into oblivion. Privacy and data protection scholars have largely ignored her seminal writings and activism. When exceptionally cited, her name has been misspelled. And her ideas are even more often misattributed, with only a few examples to the contrary.^[1]

The French magazine Femmes d’aujourd’hui described Kerstin Anér in 1983 as ‘Une européenne de choc’ – a stunning European. Her biography is rich and dense: prolific radio producer, member of the Parliament from 1969 to 1985, Secretary of State between 1976 and 1980, member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1980 to 1985; she was nominated as Chair of the Swedish Secretariat of Future Studies in 1976, she once interviewed Agatha Christie, and wrote lyrics for hymns such as ‘Aftonbön i Atomåldern’ [‘Evening Prayer in the Atomic Age’, sung in 1978 by Swedish band De’ Våras), almost became the first female Swedish bishop at some point, and did much more.

This collective forgetfulness that has sent Anér and her work into obscurity is unfortunately a common phenomenon. The history of women working on data, computers and media has only recently begun getting some notice, as have calls for feminist data protection. These calls inscribe themselves in broader efforts to think privacy and data protection taking into account less heard voices and perspectives, as brilliantly championed by United States (US) scholar Anita Allen.

Thinking Data, Thinking Power

Anér began publishing essays, articles and a number of books on data, computers, and power in the early 1970s, when she was already well known in Sweden as a politician and a public intellectual working on issues of Christian humanism. To situate her work on data in context of the debates and concerns of her time, it can be noted that her seminal book Datamakt [Data Power] was published the same year that Michel Foucault published his Surveiller et Punir [Discipline and Punish], in 1975.

Like Foucault, Anér is profoundly concerned with power. She dwells into how to govern the political impact of the computer and digital data processing, mobilizing the best data thinkers and experts of her time, such as Adelbert Podlech, Wilhelm Steinmüller, Stefano Rodotà, and Willis Ware. “Information capitalism is no less in need of control from below than any other concentrated power”, in her view (‘What requirements for protection of individual data are reasonable?’, 1976, p. 23). She discusses with great detail data protection law, reminding us there was a time in which it was possible to see Foucault sitting at the same table as the chair of the then local data protection authority, Louis Joinet (known internationally also for his work on human rights with the United Nations). “Nothing can save the powerless except data laws that have teeth”, Anér would later write.^[2]

Some of Anér’s most influential arguments – presented in her essay “Dataskuggan” [The Data Shadow] (Vår Lösen, 1972), and the article “Attack is the best defense” (1972, see below), revolve around what is at stake when humans become conflated with their data, reduced to ‘data shadows’. This term was coined by Anér herself, and only rightfully attributed to her, in computer scholarship, very recently. For Anér, a data shadow is:

“a two-dimensional image of the individual that is evoked through a or several data registers”, or “the series of ticks in different boxes as a living human individual is transformed into the data registers that tends, by those in power, to be treated as more real and interesting than the living human being herself.” (Datamakt, 1975, p. 245 )

In this prescient formulation, Anér suggests that any attempt that harnesses the power of data – its potential harm as well as its productive power – through data privacy regulations that exclusively focuses on safeguarding the privacy of individuals should not be, in Anér’s argument, the point. Instead, she cautions that it is human integrity in a broader sense that is at stake, which requires also safeguarding group integrity. These two concerns together have regularly re-emerged in contemporary scholarship – branded as innovative new arguments, without attribution to Anér’s work.

Over the years, Anér’s quest for a richer and deeper understanding of the societal challenges posed by data power took her far beyond simple notions of privacy, whether individual or collective. A motion she filed in 1982 to the Swedish Parliament reflects this much broader understanding of the problem to be solved:

“Protection against the abuse of power in the world of data means that the legislator establishes and enforces the conditions under which society’s data processing can be perceived as acceptable by citizens. This is a very practical definition of data protection, which avoids any philosophical definitions. And that is a good thing, because what is acceptable in this sense must always be a political decision, i.e. a compromise between many different interests.” (Sveriges Riksdag Motion 1981/82: 179, translated by the authors)

How to best protect society, groups and individuals from abuse of power – a concern of much relevance today – is a question much enriched when read through Anér’s work. She was not only a thinker, however, but also an active player in local and global data discussions.

A Different Voice in International Debates

Anér’s role in the international data policy discussions at the end of the 1970s is also of great interest. At that time, the emergence of data protection laws in Europe had already started to be portrayed by the US as not being about a real ambition to provide ‘protection’ for people, but as a mere ‘protectionism’, aimed at promoting European interests at the expense of American businesses. The 1973 Swedish Data Act, which granted broad discretion to a still then obscure data protection authority to allow, or to block, data transfers to third countries, was regularly highlighted as the epitome of this ‘protectionist’ trend. In this context, the US created and promoted – through the OECD and the Council of Europe – a narrative focusing on the need for countries to focus on reconciling ‘transborder data flows’, which had to be free and served the world economy, with ‘privacy’ interests, increasingly portrayed – and ever since also criticized – as individual and individualistic.

Anér actively participated in numerous international events of political relevance, like the 1978 SPIN Conference. She vigorously defended ideas such as the notion that ‘privacy’ had to be understood as protecting not just individuals but also groups, and had to be protected also collectively, by associations such as trade unions and women’s organizations. For Anér, what was at stake with data processing was much more than just ‘privacy’ issues, and solving it by regulating ‘privacy’, was not really addressing the issues at stake. Anér’s voice would soon however become less present in these arenas, replaced by other Swedish experts more akin to stage Sweden as part of the solution, and not the culprit, of the international data flows problem.

Bringing Anér Back

Critical scholars are now trying to ‘bring Anér back’ to allow her work to speak to contemporary challenges of data and power: Gloria González Fuster has placed Anér’s figure in the international data protection law landscape; Introducing her as a Christian intellectual humanist and situating her in the complex post-war Swedish Christian and theological landscape, Anton Jansson has argued that there is a strong connection between Anér’s political-legal work, and her specific interpretation of Christianity. In this sense, Anér positioned her Christianity in the modern world and its problems, calling for taking responsibility for and to the world: for Anér, God has everything to do with political questions such as pollution and “data machines”; Taking a STS history perspective, Aron Ambrosiani has placed Anérs work within the context of Swedish data and computer education from the late 1950s until the 1980s. Emphasizing the role of Swedish non-formal adult education civil society study organizations [studieförbund] as key peer-to-peer democratic educators, he has highlighted Anér’s role as a central feminist voice in civil society debates on computer literacy and data politics; And Matilda Arvidsson has looked into the notion of data shadow through Anér’s Christian theological affirmation of the human and humanist values at the core of both private and public life and politics. Relating the notion to contemporary critical legal scholarship on AI, data, and converging human material and immaterial bodies, Arvidsson has argued that Anér brought together many of the concerns now dominating critical, feminist, and new materialist debates on contemporary technologies, the Anthropocene and law. To reimagine these concerns, Arvidsson encourages us to return to the history of interwar data power debates, which have been formative for legal and political questions of surveillance, data management, privacy and foundational democratic values. Reading Anér’s work is helpful in this regard, as it situates contemporary questions of data and power as an ongoing struggle for technological innovations in societies that do not conflate humans with, or reduce humans to, their (digital) data.^[3]

This is only a first step towards (re-)discovering the work – and the world – of Anér, and, by doing so, reimagining contemporary critical scholarly debates on data law and AI in light of Anér’s seminal work. Much is still to be done to understand, situate and value Anér’s contribution to modern (data) law and policy. For instance, although Anér occasionally published her work in English, French, and German, the majority of her texts are only available in Swedish, and even these can only be accessed with difficulty. Our aim is to remedy this situation, and help repair the current disregard for such an important and critical voice.

Matilda Arvidsson (University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Gloria González Fuster (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), and Jörg Pohle (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany)

Suggested reading

Anér, Kerstin (1972) Den tillverkningsbara människan, AB Folk & Samhälle (in Swedish, out of print)

Anér, Kerstin (1972), ‘Attack is the best defense’, Management Informatics, Vol. 1, No. 5, pp. 179-180 (in English).

Anér, Kerstin (1975), Datamakt, Gummessons(in Swedish, out of print).

Anér, Kerstin (1976), ‘Contribution to the theme: What requirements for protection of individual data are reasonable?’, in Tore Dalenius and Anders Klevmarken (eds.), Proceedings of a Symposium on Personal Integrity and the Need for Data in the Social Sciences. Hässelby slott, Stockholm, March 15–17, 1976, Stockholm, Swedish Council for Social Science Research, pp. 17-24 (in English).

Anér, Kerstin (1977), ‘Datorer på extremkurs’, Svensk Tidskrift, 31 December 1977 (in Swedish).

^[1] Computer scientist, and data protection specialist, Jörg Pohle has been instrumental in the “rediscovery” of Kerstin Anér’s work on data and computers. See, for example, his criticism of legal research into the history of data protection, which ignores or overlooks many aspects, but especially many historically important people and their scholarship, among them Kerstin Anér’s and her work (p. 41).

^[2] ‘Privacy and Data Protection Legislation’, in Abbe Mowshowitz, (ed.), Human choice and computers, 2 : proceedings of the Second IFIP Conference on Human Choice and Computers, Baden, Austria, 4-8 June 1979, 1980, p. 151.

^[3] To put Anér back on the map, a symposium was organized at the University of Gothenburg in the Spring of 2024. It brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore some of the interrelations between Kerstin Anér’s many different strands of her life and work. This blog post is based on some of the findings emerging from that symposium.