Privacy: A Historical Perspective

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made waves last month when he sought to justify Facebook’s widely panned privacy overhaul as a necessary change that reflected the times in which we live. In a talk with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg said that the “social norm” regarding privacy had “evolved over time” and that Facebook was merely evolving with it. Naturally, many Internet analysts called Zuckerberg out for masking what was clearly a business decision as something that made the service better for customers.

Of course, as with all good PR spin, there was an element of truth to Zuckerberg’s statement. While we may not have completely abandoned our desire for privacy (I believe that what we desire more than anything then and now is control over our information), we certainly have opened up about what we’re willing to share. Can you imagine what people might have said 20 years ago if you described a service like Twitter? How about 30 years ago? Or 100 years ago? In considering how our perspectives on privacy have changed, I thought it would be a fun exercise to turn to some of the great minds of previous generations and see what they had to say on the subject of privacy.

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First let us examine the thoughts of two former Presidents of the United States.

“When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”

- Thomas Jefferson

“Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.”

- Lyndon B. Johnson

Here we have an interesting juxtaposition. Thomas Jefferson believed, as do most of us, that when you set out to become a public servant you knowingly cede some of your right to privacy. In other words, it is the belief that in order to effectively lead people, you must open yourself up to their scrutiny. To a certain extent, we use this same line of thought for celebrities. If they are going to make millions of dollars because of our money than we have a right to have access to them whenever we want.

Conversely, Lyndon B. Johnson believed that “every man” should be confident in knowing that his private information was secure. It should be noted of course that Johnson issued this statement when he was swearing in Ramsey Clark as Attorney General in 1967. As such, the statement is referring to a man’s right to privacy as inferred by the Constitution.

Considering that we haven’t quite figured out the legality of how companies use our information in modern times (data mining, behavioral advertising, etc) it is interesting to consider how LBJ might have phrased his words differently. Perhaps, “Every man should know that he has control over keeping his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life private.”

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Moving on from Presidents, let’s take a look at what Earl Warren, former three-time governor of California and the 14th Chief Justice of the United States, had to say about privacy and technology.

“The fantastic advances in the field of communication constitute a grave danger to the privacy of the individual.”

-Earl Warren

Chief Justice Warren left these remarks as part of a concurring opinion in the 1963 Supreme Court case of Lopez v. United States (373 U.S. 427). That case involved the legality of a federal agent surreptitiously recording a conversation with a criminal suspect and then using the recording as evidence in trial. In siding with the United States, Warren argued that the growing power of communications technology could be a threat to individual privacy and that it should be used by law enforcement agents with the utmost caution, but that it should it not be deemed automatically unconstitutional.

Given that Warren’s remarks involved criminal investigations, and he was actually saying it’s legal for law enforcement to record conversations under the right circumstances, one might think that they have no bearing on general matters of Internet privacy today. I disagree, however. Chief Justice Warren went out of his way to say that advances in communications were a legitimate threat to personal privacy. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to believe that if he had lived long enough to see Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter he would have been even more adamant about the importance of restraint in monitoring private communication.

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What do you think of these historical insights on privacy? Can you think of any more interesting historical perspectives on privacy? Feel free to share them in the comments.