Work on a book for long enough and you risk the acknowledgments section becoming a book in itself. But, as I’d like to stay on my editor’s good side, these few paragraphs will have to do the job. I hope they will convey something of the depth of my gratitude for the backing of so many friends, family members, colleagues, students, and institutions over the past decade. Let me begin with those who pulled this book over the finish line, most especially Joyce Seltzer, editor extraordinaire. She has my thanks for her confidence in this project, her ability to see it whole when I couldn’t, and her sage advice every step of the way. The crack team at Harvard University Press, led by Kathi Drummy and Stephanie Vyce, handled my many queries with equal parts grace and efficiency. Late in the game, Mario Rewers took time out from his own doctoral research to puzzle through thorny permissions and copyright questions, going far beyond the call of duty. Kim Giambattisto steered the book through the production process surely and smoothly.
Support for my scholarship flowed first and foremost from Vanderbilt University and its fabulous history department. It has been my good fortune to work with a series of terrific chairs who are also friends—Liz Lunbeck, Jim Epstein, and Joel Harrington—and in a program kept humming by an extraordinary administrative staff (with particular thanks on that score to Heidi Welch). Time, space, and funding also came from the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I am especially grateful for a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, which allowed me to spend a year at Berkeley’s Law School and Center for the Study of Law and Society. The tremendous group of scholars there—including Melissa Murray, James Rule, Paul Schwartz, Jonathan Simon, and David Sklansky—offered a warm welcome and lessons in legal thinking; Chris Jay Hoofnagle introduced me to the vibrant intellectual community that he and Dan Solove have created through the Privacy Law Scholars Conference. Two spring stints at Rivendell Writers’ Colony supplied the best kind of solitude (thank you, thank you, Carmen Toussaint!), leavened by the companionship of a remarkable group of novelists, essayists, and poets.
Time and funds were critical to this book, but for its substance I’m indebted to the staffs of numerous libraries and archives, including the Social Security Administration Historian’s Office (with thanks to Eric DeLisle and Richard Gabryszewski), the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, the Special Collections Library at Penn State, and Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Several skilled undergraduate research assistants—Leslie Bruce, Caley Caito, and Abigail Miller—were immensely helpful in gathering and analyzing research materials.
I was seriously lucky in the people—and the brainpower—around me as I produced this tome. A raft of friends and colleagues shared ideas, read drafts, commented on conference papers, volunteered cites, and cheered this book along, including Brian Balogh, Samantha Barbas, Casey Blake, Dan Bouk, danah boyd, Howard Brick, Jessica Burch, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Jeff Cowie, Katie Crawford, Dirk Hartog, Ellen Herman, Chris Hoofnagle, Dan Horowitz, the late Michael Katz, Chris Loss, Liz Lunbeck, Heather Murray, Kathy Peiss, Neil Richards, Stanford Ross, Edward Rubin, James Rule, Jeffrey Ruoff, Bruce Schulman, Barbara Sicherman, David Sklansky, Chris Slobogin, Mark Solovey, Amy Dru Stanley, Kim Welch, Michael Willrich, and Mary Ziegler. Conversations over the years with Leslie Butler, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and Dorothy Ross—along with their trenchant scholarship and critique—invigorated my work. Dorothy in particular has kept a close eye on this project and kindly helped me think through many of its angles. Invitations to give talks at institutions too numerous to list sharpened my arguments, regularly reminding me of the profound generosity undergirding academic life.
One of the saving graces of writing a book is the fellow travelers on the journey. At Vanderbilt, I had the inspiring company of Dominique Béhague, Paul Kramer, Terry Maroney, Dan Sharfstein, Ganesh Sitamarin, and Laura Stark as they crafted fascinating research projects of their own. I thank each of them for dissecting chapters, and for plenty of commiseration along the way. For moral support at the sentence level, I’m not sure what I would have done without Ruth Rogaski and Arleen Tuchman (and the many Nashville coffeehouses we camped out in). What began as an experiment became an indispensable weekly ritual, and I’m so grateful for their collective wisdom about work, words, and much else.
And then there are those hardy souls who read all, or nearly all, of a sprawling manuscript. I thank my lucky stars that Dan Rodgers still agrees to read my work after all these years, never failing to deepen and transform my understanding of what I’ve written. I am forever grateful to have been his student—and for a conversation that now spans two decades. Whether down the hall or across the Atlantic, my dear friend Gary Gerstle offered incisive commentary on just about every piece of the manuscript, and the book is much better for it. Ole Molvig had no choice but to play the role of in-house critic. Fortunately for me, he did so with characteristic virtuosity and verve. Two anonymous readers, whom I am delighted to thank publicly here, floored me with their thoroughgoing, searching reviews of an early draft. I can only hope that I’ve done justice to the time and investment others have poured into this book.
A critical, if less visible, infrastructure of scholarship is the network of family and friends that sustain it. I can’t possibly name all the people who organized carpools and sleepovers, dinner parties and camping trips, and generally made Nashville such a great place to live and work for almost a decade now. But the short list must include Lauren Clay, Leor Halevi, Dominique Béhague, Ann Mikkelsen, Dan Sharfstein, Adriane Seiffert, Frank Tong, Traci Nordberg, Peter Nordberg, Anne Fentress, and Tim Nichols. Although further afield (alas!), my extended family has been just as critical to the enterprise. My parents, John and Mittie Igo, took us in for a memorable year in the Bay Area. They have, more importantly, been an unflagging source of support and encouragement in all things. Dianne Molvig and Randy Korda’s willingness to make the drive from Madison made research trips easier to contemplate and much happier for my children. Precious time spent with my sisters and brothers-in-law on the West Coast—Susan and Nigel Forman, Kate and Greg McClain, Becky and Matt Sniffen, and Jennifer Igo, along with Claire, Scott, Charlotte, Emmie, Benjamin, and Ian—has fortified what my kids call our “little family,” as have our Wisconsin sojourns with Ariel Molvig, Anna Momont, Olaf, and Aren. Pixel helped too, by dragging me away from my desk and taking me on lots of walks.
There are still others to thank. Though my topic has been privacy, my most heartfelt appreciation goes to those who have—hands down—invaded mine most thoroughly. My three remarkable daughters were all born during the time that I labored on this book, and they have grown up alongside it. From a tender age, each in her way seemed to understand and forgive the time required of this project. Eleanor: thank you for your loyalty and insight, your interest in other people (including your mom), and your wonderful way with words. Greta: thank you for your laughter, your joyful nature, and for making our life together so fun. Hattie: thank you for your independent spirit, your big-heartedness, and for always asking about my day. In the end, my children’s precise mix of patience and impatience with this book was just what I needed to get it done—and I am so pleased, at long last, to be able to give them incontrovertible evidence of its completion.
Finally: I knew when I married Ole Molvig that I was hitching myself to a charming and brilliant historian of science. What I could not know, then, was that this was a man who would be utterly unfazed by a ten-hour solo drive with three young children (not to mention a brand-new puppy) if that’s what it took for me to squeeze in a few extra days of writing. And that is just to begin to recount his dazzling array of talents—and my truly incalculable debt to him. It is to him and our children that I dedicate this book, with love.