Scars of the Gestapo: Remembrance and Privacy Concerns

41 Pages Posted: 20 Jan 2023 Last revised: 4 Jun 2023

See all articles by Sebastian Bauer

Sebastian Bauer

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Florencia Hnilo

Stanford University

Date Written: January 18, 2023

Abstract

We study how remembrance of an authoritarian regime impacts privacy concerns. Our main hypothesis is that Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) focuses Germans’ attention on the risks associated with private data ending up in the wrong hands. One example of this culture of remembrance are the Stolpersteine, plaques on the sidewalk signalling that a victim of Nazi persecution lived on a given address. We use a detailed street level imagery dataset of Berlin to relate the location of the Stolpersteine to a novel geolocated measure of privacy concerns: whether a person asks for their building to be blurred on a street-level imagery provider. We show that there exists a positive relationship between the amount of Stolpersteine near a person’s house or workplace, and the probability that this person will ask the imagery provider to blur the front of their house. This relationship is very localized, as most of the effect concentrates on Stolpersteine that are less than 10 meters away.

Keywords: privacy concerns, Stolpersteine, culture of remembrance, Germany

JEL Classification: N44, N94, R23, R52

Suggested Citation

Bauer, Sebastian and Hnilo, Florencia, Scars of the Gestapo: Remembrance and Privacy Concerns (January 18, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4328676 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4328676

Sebastian Bauer

Stanford Graduate School of Business ( email )

655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
United States

HOME PAGE: http://sebauer.com

Florencia Hnilo (Contact Author)

Stanford University ( email )

Landau Economics Building
579 Serra Mall
STANFORD, CA 94305-6072
United States

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