A History in 46 Images

December 1, 2015 5:03 AM

The Birth and Death of Privacy
posted by the man of twists and turns (28 comments total)

I have Feelings about this subject but they're none of your business.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:27 AM on December 1, 2015

This is something I know very little about but find hugely fascinating. Looking back at history, privacy seems like a relatively new concept, but its also aided some remarkable and important changes in society. No doubt its also brought out different behaviors in people. The pessimist in me thinks that there is not much that can be done to truly protect privacy long term thanks to large systems like our government and economy wanting access to well, everything.

It would be interesting to hop into a time machine to ask the future what they might have thought about our little experimental phase of privacy.
posted by lownote at 6:03 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Cool, I had never heard of the role played by President Grover Cleveland's wife in enshrining privacy.

It should also be noted that Cardinal Albrecht had a pretty sweet office.
posted by bouvin at 6:09 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Privacy might be a recent thing, but so is having 7 million people on the planet. If the world population was only 5 million in 8000AD, then it makes sense that privacy wasn't something that people valued, or even named back then. But a big human population is the new normal, so I don't think privacy is going away any time soon. I you could transplant ancient humans to today, I bet you'd see them closing doors and installing ad-blocking software within weeks.
posted by selfmedicating at 6:15 AM on December 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

~This embedded content is from a site that does not comply with the Do Not Track (DNT) setting now enabled on your browser.
Please note, if you click through and view it anyway, you may be tracked by the website hosting the embed.

~Embedded source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhwXipv3tRU

Kismet.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:16 AM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm a bit uneasy with the easy conflation of privacy, anonymity, solitude, etc in the article. Add to that, the swing-and-a-miss interpretation of Utku family's anger in response to the anthropologist's risky behavior in the harsh wilderness, and I'm getting a real cherry-picking, propaganda vibe from the piece.
posted by klarck at 6:21 AM on December 1, 2015 [9 favorites]

I like the anthropologist's take that privacy is a social construction. The most interesting adaptation I have seen is a friendly family I know that lives in a two bathroom house with three school-age children and in their house one bathroom is for mom and the girl and the other bathroom is for dad and the boys.

Also that was the very first time I have ever noticed my browser displaying that Do Not Track widget. Does medium always show that or is that author's choice?
posted by bukvich at 6:26 AM on December 1, 2015

Jill Lepore, from the New Yorker (2013): "The Prism: Privacy in an age of publicity."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:33 AM on December 1, 2015

“The magic age is people born after 1981…That’s the cut-off for us where we see a big change in privacy settings and user acceptance.” ~ Loopt Co-Founder Sam Altman, who pioneered paid geo-location features.

The irony is that this carefree attitude towards transparency describes the same generation that regards Snowden as a hero for alerting us to government measures that were logging every digital contact made. Clearly younger concerns favor private companies over public agencies, which may be an anti-authoritarian leftover from the same cold war that primed the older generation to allow government secrecy.
posted by Brian B. at 6:39 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Privacy, as it is conventionally understood, is only about 150 years old. Most humans living throughout history had little concept of privacy in their tiny communities. Sex, breastfeeding, and bathing were shamelessly performed in front of friends and family.

Or maybe it's shame that's only 150 years old...
posted by chavenet at 6:57 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think there's a HUGE difference between being seen, and being tracked. Sure, live without walls, sleep in communal beds with your livestock, etc - that's a way to live your life which you control. But, giving information about yourself to people who can use that to control you, make your life worse, exploit you - this is totally different.


It's the permanent record that is the problem. If my servant doesn't like the way I snore, they can find a new person to work for. But what if the government tells my insurer that I have sleep apnea, reducing my health rating making me less competitive for employment for the rest of my life...
posted by rebent at 7:10 AM on December 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

On the Medium / Do-Not-Track thing, here's a screenshot of what it looks like if your browser is advertising DNT. It's something Medium is doing, not YouTube. For the longest time Do-Not-Track was considered dead, particularly after Microsoft announced it would be the default in Internet Explorer and soon after every major web advertising company said they'd ignore it. Medium has decided to respect it recently, I'm not quite sure why except they think it's the right thing to do.

I think the evolving notion of privacy is an important topic, but this article conflates a bunch of different issues. Seeing my mother crouch over a chamberpot is very different from the US government recording every single phone call's source and destination or individuals not protesting Internet advertisers tracking details about them. Database technology means obscurity is disappearing. That's different from privacy of, say, bodily functions. (Although as the article notes, we are now sharing more data about our bodies too.)

Every time this discussion comes up I feel compelled to point out David Brin's Transparent Society, now almost 20 years old. It offers a different way to handle the destruction of privacy that information technology has brought.
posted by Nelson at 7:17 AM on December 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

I like the anthropologist's take that privacy is a social construction.

Uh, what else would it be? It seems very uninformative to announce that a facet of social life is a "social construction".
posted by thelonius at 7:18 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Every time this discussion comes up I feel compelled to point out David Brin's Transparent Society, now almost 20 years old. It offers a different way to handle the destruction of privacy that information technology has brought.

Brin's concept fails because it assumes that equal access coincides with equal capability to act on that access, which is false. Just because everyone's information is out there doesn't mean that you wouldn't see people suddenly finding their opportunities curtailed courtesy of that information, or that such curtailment would cleave on racial, gender, or class lines. In fact, minorities, women, and the underclass already live under a societal Panopticon of sorts, and I doubt any would say that the system enhances privacy.

Brin's argument is the sort of woolgathering that comes from someone who has never experienced the sort of system they espouse, and whose position in society protects them from the major repercussions of that system.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:56 AM on December 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

A number of comments make it clear that no real distinction being made between privacy, ie, Not Being Seen and privacy, Not Being Tracked.
Thus, the 4 poster bed gave privacy of not being seen to a couple having sex in a bed, but those others sharing the room could not seen. Privacy in tracking in this example would be collecting data on exactly what took place in that bed.
posted by Postroad at 8:13 AM on December 1, 2015

I like Solo beds. What with the vest and all. But Lando steals all the covers.
posted by Smedleyman at 10:14 AM on December 1, 2015

This article rubs me the wrong way. Too eager to associate privacy with the Church, with piety and disease. Too eager to associate modern "transparent" living with the young, the hip, the sexy. (The gonewild example doesn't show faces - now why is that?) It strikes me as conscious propaganda.

One of the issues with modern concerns about privacy is the surprise that can result from pervasive surveillance.

A Roman using a public toilet was entering a situation he understood well, and one whose consequences would end pretty quickly.

If you're using Amazon to pursue books about political dissent, or divorce, or health issues, you probably can't guess all the data that generates, how long it might be kept, who is keeping it, or what the ultimate repercussions might be.

Today American municipal police use license plate scanners and aerial surveillance to build de-facto databases that track the movements of all the vehicles they can see. It's safe to assume that virtually all digital telecom is scanned by three letter agencies. There simply was no way to do anything equivalent in Roman times. How much does it matter that Romans used to poop together?

It would be more appropriate to discuss the Stasi than to point out that people used to have sex in the same room as their kids. Nobody's saying "Privacy is dead! Better make whoopee while the kids watch!" This only pretends to address modern concerns.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:27 AM on December 1, 2015 [8 favorites]

The summary of Silicon Valley's Political Endgame left me wondering about the whole thing.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:11 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Just another annoying hyperbolic chicken-little headline. The news aggregators are all about that these days ... have to exaggerate to get a little meagre attention for their sponsors. Even BoingBoing, once a smart place, now an auction barn

"Death" of privacy? How many people gladly splash their particulars all over the web? is that 'death'? Or dandruff?

So once everyone's been whipped into a hydrophobic frenzy about the topic, I suspect the next thing will be the emergence "Privacy Management Services" (PMS). Get your apps started.
posted by Twang at 11:15 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

"privacy dandruff" - what a wonderful concept, thanks Twang :)
posted by rebent at 11:59 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Death" of privacy? How many people gladly splash their particulars all over the web? is that 'death'? Or dandruff?

Gladly?

Or are they not given a choice?

It's easy to say that they don't care, but I don't think that's true. I think they've been taught by the way our systems are designed that their info is the price of admission to our modern agora.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:37 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

Gladly?

Or are they not given a choice?

Agreed that there is an illusion of choice in many cases. Should the burden of proof be on children using devices supplied by their schools?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation just filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches:

"While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords. Google doesn’t first obtain permission from students or their parents and since some schools require students to use Chromebooks, many parents are unable to prevent Google’s data collection."

posted by cynical pinnacle at 1:53 PM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sex, breastfeeding, and bathing were shamelessly performed in front of friends and family.

That has little to do with privacy, and much to do with views of bodily functions, shame, morality.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:47 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Death" of privacy? How many people gladly splash their particulars all over the web? is that 'death'? Or dandruff?


Many. But they choose to do so. And the research indicates that they feel strongly that they should continue to have the choice to choose what they do, and do not share.

Modern information privacy is not about secrecy. It is about choice, and control, and there is no indication that it is dying. People still want those things - see, for example, this recent Pew research study.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:58 PM on December 1, 2015

Privacy, as it is conventionally understood, is only about 150 years old. Most humans living throughout history had little concept of privacy in their tiny communities. Sex, breastfeeding, and bathing were shamelessly performed in front of friends and family.

Little concept of privacy? Or just little ability to have privacy?

And, though the article does hint at this with the chart of whether people prefer sex indoors or outdoors, the article is really talking about indoors privacy. For most of human history, privacy was available by walking a few dozen feet away into the woods or behind a rock, but not at all available in the sleeping arrangements. That's still the case for many people living in poor places -- you live in a one-room house or apartment, so you get privacy elsewhere.

And privacy is a floating concept. Every public park and plaza I have been in in Latin America has had young people making out on the benches -- they are in full view of anyone who walks by, and yet there is a kind of privacy there, in the most public of places, that they don't have at home.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:54 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Privacy is very dependant on context. When we lived in a house on a busy downtown street, we never bothered with curtains on the main floor. So many people streaming by, so many neighbours, it seemed private and anonymous in the crowd. Now that we live in a quiet 1950's suburb, that anonymity is gone, curtains are up, and they are closed every evening when it gets dark out.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:51 PM on December 1, 2015

The history in this is mostly crap. Multi-roomed houses were common thousands of years ago; the classic "Israelite" house is called a four-roomed house: three rooms in a row, with a fourth at the rear. Sometimes the central "room" is an open courtyard, making it sort-of similar to houses in other Mediterranean societies, which were often arranged around a courtyard. We don't know very much about the way four-roomed houses were used, but the Greek oikos was designed around the idea that some parts were public and others private. Maybe the author is fixated on northern Europe, where cold weather tended to push people together? But even so, single beds were common. E.g.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:03 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

Why don't we just ask the nearest 150-year-old what they think of this newfangled "privacy". Oh wait ...

This is a poorly written and edited rah-rah piece that reads like propaganda.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 12:25 AM on December 3, 2015