Dr. Alan H. Westin, the world's leading privacy expert, has died
February 21, 2013 Dear Willett Dr. Alan Westin died on 18th February at the age of 83 still expanding the boundaries of privacy research working on a study of privacy across 4,000 years including Medieval Europe and Israel. I last met him at the Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners' Conference in Jerusalem in October 2010. Appropriately, in recognition of his leading status in the field, he gave the address at the official conference cocktail party at the Israel Museum and I wrote to him that it was "pithy, witty and to the point." Dr. Westin was Emeritus Professor of Public Law and Government at Columbia University, New York, and advisor to governments and privacy surveys in many countries. He was the keynote speaker at Privacy Laws & Business's 10th Anniversary Conference in Cambridge in July 1997. We published a report on his masterly survey and forecast, Struggles to defend privacy: Challenges from 1950 to 2010 in the July 1997 edition of Privacy Laws & Business International Newsletter which you can access at www.privacylaws.com/Documents/issue40.pdf The previous year, on 17th September 1996, Alan Westin actively participated in Privacy Laws & Business's Data Protection Law and Genetics Workshop in Ottawa on the day before the Privacy and Data Protection Commissioners' Conference that year. He always spoke with authority and plain language, in this case, on genetic aspects of employment, police investigations, or health issues, with minimal or no notes. Dr. David H. Flaherty, Consultant, former Information and Privacy Commissioner, British Columbia, Canada, in his Reflections on 50 years of privacy and data protection at PL&B's 25th Anniversary Conference last July, mentioned that in the 1960's he was a student of Alan Westin, as you can see at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o0JEAilOyg&feature=youtu.be Many privacy scholars have paid tribute to Alan Westin in The Washington Post obituary at http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/alan-f-westin-scholar-of-privacy-in-the-information-ages-dies-at-83/2013/02/19/7258b28c-7aa6-11e2-a044-676856536b40_story.html Robert Ellis Smith, Publisher of Privacy Journal, wrote to me: "He was a mentor to many scholars and writers who specialized in privacy from the 1980s to the present, including myself, and was truly the preeminent expert in this field." I agree, as he was always encouraging about our work at Privacy Laws & Business. Although I asked to interview him during my most recent visit to New York in March 2011, he wanted to wait until his historical cross-cultural magnum opus was finished and ready for publication. Always modest, his last e-mail to me stated: "I am still working on my history of privacy volume, finding that covering 4,000 years of Western civilizations will take a little more of my time." Stewart Dresner
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