Privacy #1: The Technology Connection

It is hard to remember that privacy is not an inherent characteristic of humans, writes Rahul Matthan in Privacy 3.0. Just think about the life of our ancient ancestors: people who tended to hide some parts of their life (which is what privacy means) were looked upon with suspicion! What was he/she trying to hide? Why was he keeping secrets? How could you trust such a person?

 

How then did privacy eventually grow in societies? Matthan answers:

“(Privacy) is born of technology.”

 

Matthan gives examples. His first one is the printing press. In England, Edmund Curll rode on the power of the printing press to print books for the common man’s tastes – “scandalous entertainment” and “trashy paperbacks”. One time, he published one of Alexander Pope’s private poems despite Pope having explicitly forbidden it. Curll also published five volumes of Pope’s private correspondences:

“(The printing press) made it possible to expose private writings and personal correspondence in ways that had been impossible until then.”

It was now evident that while democratization of text and knowledge was a huge benefit, surely a “proprietary right to personal writings” was necessary. Wasn’t privacy something that needed to be protected?

 

Another example was the portable camera. “Portable” is the keyword, since it meant that photos could suddenly be taken anywhere, without the knowledge or consent of the person whose photo was taken, often with concealed cameras:

“Amateur photographers… (were) opportunistically taking pictures of the rich and the famous when their guard was down and then selling those pictures to newspapers and magazines.”

Journalism was turning into a “salacious gossip” churning machinery. The intrusion into the lives of the rich and the famous was also becoming evident – didn’t they have a right to privacy?

 

A third pair of examples he cites are the postal network and telegraph. While they made personal correspondence easy and affordable to all, it also meant that the employees of the postal system and telegraph operators could see anyone’s correspondence. Again, it raised the importance of a right to privacy. Conversely, when the telegraph was used extensively by both sides of the American Civil War, the US and other governments realized the importance of being able to eavesdrop, for “national security purposes”, of course. Governments tried to force telegraph companies to create backdoors to tap into the communication flowing through them. Sound familiar to similar attempts today by governments to tap into digital data flowing through the Internet? Then, as now, there was backlash against the move… the right to privacy was at the forefront.

 

All these examples are why Matthan writes:

“As much as it (privacy) owes its creation to technology, it is technology that is its biggest nemesis.”