Award for paper on archival practices and the right to be forgotten
At this year’s UKAIS conference in Newcastle, Klara Källström, Marie Eneman, and Jan Ljungberg received the Best Research-in-Progress Paper Award for their conference paper on digital images, archival practices, and algorithmic governance.
Using the Swedish police’s use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology as a case study, the researchers show how images stored and shared within digital systems often become difficult to delete—even though individuals have the right to be forgotten under the GDPR. The study highlights a growing gap between the intentions of the law and how technology works in practice, where automated decision-making and institutional routines complicate the act of deletion.
As digital images become fluid, mobile, and embedded within algorithmic infrastructures, this paper examines the politics of visibility in algorithmic governance, focusing on digital archives, data retention, and the governance of deletion. Using the Swedish police’s adoption of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology as a case study, it explores how networked images resist erasure, challenging the enforcement of the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). By analyzing policy documents, institutional workflows, and bureaucratic decision-making, the paper asks: How do archival practices influence the ability to uphold the right to be forgotten within algorithmic governance? The findings reveal tensions between public and private data infrastructures, where automated decision-making, predictive analytics, and archival mechanisms entrench networked images in state operations. This study calls for a re-evaluation of privacy, digital archives, and algorithmic governance, as deletion remains a politically and technically contingent act within distributed systems.