“And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analyzing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.”
Aysha Taryam
How important is privacy? Before you answer, consider the many occasions in our lives and throughout history when we neither expected nor experienced it.
As newborn babes, we have zero interest in privacy; and for the first months of our existence, we are not given any. We are constantly in the company of our parents or caregivers, who, if they are responsible people, do not let us out of their sight for more than a minute during the day and check on us regularly during the night.
Even as children, we have little or no expectation of privacy. If we do seek it, it is usually because we’ve done something wrong and want to hide. The book of Genesis reports Adam and Eve—childlike in their innocence—had no privacy, nor desired it, until they disobeyed God. “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” it says in Genesis 3:8, “and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.”
As older children, we do expect more privacy, some more so than others. I was about ten, visiting my grandparents in the summer, when after spending a wonderful day at the beach, we all needed to change into dry clothes before getting into the car. Each person did so, by hiding behind a curtain of raised towels; but that wasn’t enough privacy for me. I pitched a fit, until Grandpa struck on the idea of allowing me to change inside the closed trunk of the car!
Even in the locker room of a typical high school, we are expected to undress and shower in the company of others. I recall feeling uncomfortable about it at first but soon enough got used to it. Certainly, neither I nor my fellow students thought some fundamental human right was being violated.
Historically, it is much the same story. Before there were cities, we lived in tribes, where there was very little or no privacy whatsoever. Being indoors meant sharing a tepee, igloo, hut, or longhouse with others. Being outdoors meant hunting or gathering with others—venturing into the wilderness alone being extremely hazardous to one’s health.
In his best-selling book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, celebrated anthropologist Jared Diamond explains privacy is still largely nonexistent among today’s tribal cultures, even when it comes to the most intimate aspects of life. “Because hunter-gatherer children sleep with their parents, either in the same bed or in the same hut, there is no privacy. Children see their parents having sex.”545
In most ancient cities as well—Greek ones being a notable exception—there was little privacy, and equally little expectation of it. In ancient Rome, people frequented public baths and public restrooms, where they walked around nude and did their business in the company of others. Indeed, a great deal of socializing happened in those wide-open, public settings.
Invasion of Privacy: Architecture
For ordinary people, such a lack of privacy continued into medieval times. “In fourteenth-century London, privacy was a scarce and contested commodity,” says historian David Vincent in Privacy: A Short History. “It was not a possession or a secure right, but rather an aspiration . . .”546
“Private space was scarce in the High Middle Ages because domestic interiors were not yet highly compartmentalized,” explains Alice Jane Cooley, who did her PhD thesis on the subject of privacy, at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. “At the lower end of the social scale, throughout the period, a single room might suffice for a dwelling.”547 In Night in the Middle Ages, Jean Verdon concurs: “Documents and miniatures frequently show an entire family sleeping in a single bed.”548
Domiciles of very wealthy Europeans often did have many rooms. For example, the fourteenth-century Dijon mansion of Regnaud Chevalier, the duke of Burgundy’s tailor, had twenty-four separate spaces.
But such mansions were usually stuffed to the rafters with family, friends, travelling guests, and servants. A typical master’s bedchamber housed multiple beds, in order to accommodate sundry man-servants and dependents. In consequence, explains French historian Georges Duby in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, “there was no more solitude in the bedroom than there was in the monks’ dormitory.”549
Even in the New World, the average American colonist neither expected nor experienced much privacy. Having lived in Massachusetts for much of my life, I’m quite familiar with the typical, early-American home. It consisted of a single large room, warmed by a massive hearth. Quite cozy, to be sure, but hardly a place for finding any solitude.
The immortal words in the US Declaration of Independence are further evidence of early America’s distant relationship with privacy. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”550 Nowhere in the entire declaration, US Constitution, or Bill of Rights is there any explicit reference to privacy as a God-given right.551
The colonists might very well have wished for greater privacy, but clearly it was not as much of a priority for them as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the constitution—which forbid illegal searches and seizures, and protect against self-incrimination, respectively—are not full-throated assertions of an unalienable right to privacy.
Invasion of Privacy: Urbanization
There’s not a clear-cut moment in history when privacy ceased being a luxury and started becoming something the masses expected and obtained. But historians of early European life generally associate it with the rise of urbanization, whose dense populations radically transformed city-dwellers’ very concept of privacy.
“In its bleakest form, privacy became a synonym for isolation, as meaningful engagement with others was overwhelmed by the press of numbers,” says historian David Vincent. “During the seventeenth century, London almost tripled in size.”552
One way these early urbanites sought meaningful, one-on-one interactions was through personal correspondence, a popular practice greatly aided by seventeenth-century Europe’s increasing literacy rate. Written letters, sealed inside envelopes, were private conversations with close friends and family.
“Between 1500 and 1800, man’s altered relation to the written word,” notes French historian Roger Chartier, “helped to create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community.”553
Individual.
Retreat.
Seeking refuge from the community.
Chartier’s choice of words confirms the emergence of privacy in Western civilization was not an entirely great thing but a symptom of ills associated with urbanization. Those ills worsened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the industrial revolution lured ever greater swarms of Europeans from their small, tight-knit rural communities with the promise of factory jobs in the big cities.
We get a picture of the tumultuous state of affairs from two prominent Boston attorneys, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, a future Supreme Court justice. In 1890 they wrote “The Right to Privacy,” a landmark article published in the Harvard Law Review.
“The intensity and complexity of [urban] life, attendant upon advancing civilization,” they grieved, “have rendered necessary some retreat from the world . . . so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual.”554
“Privacy is something which has emerged out of the urban boom coming from the industrial revolution,” avers Vinton Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist.555 So much so, that by the nineteenth century, “Americans were obsessed with the idea of privacy . . .,” explains Jill Lepore, a distinguished historian at Harvard University.556
Invasion of Privacy: Technology
Historically, technology was as much a foe of personal privacy as architecture or urbanization. In their 1890 article, “The Right to Privacy,” Warren and Brandeis cautioned that, “Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life, and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’” [See WEB: MEMORY LANE.]
The mechanical devices to which Warren and Brandeis referred included the telephone, which in its early years required many households in a neighborhood to share a single telephone wire. Party lines, as they were called, existed as recently as the 1960s in rural American communities.557
Keith Lawrence, a reporter for the Messenger-Inquirer in Owens-boro, Kentucky, recalls “you had to wait for somebody down the road to finish their conversation before you could make a call.” Worse, when your turn did come to place a call, “some folks got their kicks out of eavesdropping. You quickly learned to assume that somebody was listening to every call you made.”558
The mechanical devices of Warren and Brandeis also included the telegraph, transatlantic cables, and early progenitors of radio—all of which, together with the telephone, indeed made it entirely plausible for a whisper to be shouted from the rooftops— and even clear around the world. Years later, TV and the world wide web would further menace our privacy in ways even the two prescient attorneys from Boston never imagined.
Invasion of Privacy: Our Own Behavior
Nowadays, there’s a culprit even worse than invasive technology. It’s the strange willingness we have to sabotage our own privacy.
Harvard’s Jill Lepore calls it “the paradox of American culture,” whereby “we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection….” We’re an addled society obsessed simultaneously “with being seen and with being hidden,” she says, “a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity.”559
At an outdoor festival in Brooklyn, New York, performance artist Risa Puno offered people cookies frosted with the logos of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, in exchange for sensitive personal information. Incredibly, scores of people willingly coughed up their addresses, phone numbers, and mother’s maiden names—all for a cookie!560
The Instagram cookie was especially popular. People gladly gave Puno their fingerprints, driver’s license information, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers—simply for the right to take a photo of the cookie. “They wanted to hold it against the sky with the bridge in the background,” says the artist.561
Consider, too, what happened when AT&T offered customers ultrafast, fiber-optic internet service for a cut-rate price. The only caveat was that customers needed to allow the company to track their online browsing behavior—ostensibly, so that AT&T could target ads at them more effectively. AT&T explained to customers they could opt out of the program, and thus protect their online privacy, merely by paying thirty dollars more per month.562
The result? Evidently, most people don’t think their privacy is worth even thirty dollars.
“Since we began offering the service,” reports Gretchen Schultz, a company spokesperson, “the vast majority have elected to opt-in to the ad-supported model.”563
Invasion of Privacy: Generation Gap
In the following chapters, we will see how many technologies are forcing us backward, to a time when privacy was a rare or nonexistent luxury for most people. A time when we lived transparent lives—a future many suggest is healthy. But also a time when Big Brother is able to snoop into every single aspect of our lives—a future surely anything but healthy.
Opinions about the schizophrenic future of our privacy is as divided as people’s opinions about Edward Snowden, the young American who in 2013 leaked secret documents from the US National Security Agency.564 To those who value transparency above all else, he is a hero. To those who value privacy above all else, he is a traitor.
Millennials commonly fall into the former category. “When Edward Snowden went public with his leaks in 2013,” says baby boomer Greg Austin of the Australian Centre for Cyber Security, “we found that all the young people thought [Snowden] had done the right thing and all the people of my generation thought he’d done the wrong thing.”565
Michael Hayden, former CIA director, agrees, saying about today’s young intelligence staffers: “I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials . . . simply have different understandings of the words loyalty and secrecy and transparency than certainly my generation did.”566
Business leaders observe the same phenomenon: young people are more casual about privacy than the general population. “The magic age is people born after 1981,” says Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator and co-founder of Loopt, a now-discontinued app that revealed your location to people at all times. “That’s the cut-off for us, where we see a big change in [online apps’] privacy settings and user acceptance.”
If the ascending generations—Gens X, Y, and Z—truly do value transparency over privacy, then we are most likely headed toward a future of greater openness, a throwback to the days of public baths and party lines.
To Gregory Ferenstein—a progressive, millennial author who has written extensively on the subject of privacy, technology, and politics— that possibility is a cause for optimism. “It’s hard to know whether complete and utter transparency will realize a techno-utopia of a more honest and innovative future,” he says. “But, given that privacy has only existed for a sliver of human history, it’s disappearance is unlikely to doom mankind. Indeed, transparency is humanity’s natural state.”567
As a baby boomer, I’m a good deal older than Ferenstein. Yet, I agree with him about the nobility of people living transparent lives and corporations, institutions, and governments operating openly and honestly.
Still, I believe it’s dangerous to romanticize the goodness of transparency, even if historically it’s been humanity’s natural state. For, as the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne once stated, “There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.”568