In 2nd-century Rome, even toilets weren’t private. Royalty and nobility sat side by side, on elaborately decorated commodes arranged in rows, to chat through their ablutions.
Solitude was sinister, the 16th-century German priest Martin Luther warned. “For the devil watches and lies in wait for you most of all when you are alone.”
Privacy of thought, place, emotion is not a human instinct. In fact, it could be said to be quite unnatural, albeit unquestionably vital, says British writer and cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins.
In her book, Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, Jenkins traces this arc over centuries, to the status of coveted asset; a means for intimacy, self-discovery, freedom.
It is a fragile social contract that only really emerged about 200 years ago (around the same time as the railways and photography). It is something we are still negotiating: parents and teens, individuals and employers, citizens and governments, users and apps.
The key debates have been unchanged for centuries: who gets to decide what constitutes privacy, and how those are rules applied?
LINE OF CONTROL
Take a simple example. Jenkins, also presenter of a BBC Radio 4 show and a trustee of the British Museum, is often asked about her private life at public events. It is something that deeply frustrates her, she says.
It is a tricky one, she admits. There are few absolutes in the “dance between the public and the private spheres”. Yet this is one of the most important binaries of modern civilisation.
From it stem the reach of political power, the extents of intimacy and private relationships, freedom of choice, even the freedom (increasingly under threat) to simply opt out of the system.
Meanwhile, privacy is a right we now take for granted. Endangering it further.
“People assume the protection of this right comes with money, or with things like corridors, curtains and front doors. It doesn’t. It comes through political and cultural settlements,” Jenkins says.
Those settlements are shaped out of sight, often conveyed to us in legislation or terms of use scores of pages long. The result, in a hyperlinked world, is that we have no idea how private our private lives are.
A SPACE TO BE
Why doesn’t this bother us more?
Partly because the issue is a complex tangle that often feels beyond our reach. (Click here to read Kashyap Kompella’s take on why we care so little about data privacy)
But partly because it is also part of an ancient and frightening binary: privacy vs exclusion.
As recently as the 1500s, medieval morality codes in Europe were intensifying this idea. Religion regulated most aspects of life, and “the overriding sentiment was that one shouldn’t do anything in private one wouldn’t do in public. Privacy was somewhat equated with the idea of a secret life, and that was thought of as a frightening thing,” Jenkins says.
Then, in 1517, a turning point.
Luther’s defiance of the Catholic church sparked off the Protestant Reformation. Believers should follow scripture and their conscience, rather than papal authority, he said.
He wasn’t promoting privacy, but his message lent credence to the idea that one’s inner realm ought to exist beyond the control of church and state, and ought to be honoured.
Stated like this, it was a new idea, but Europe would soon be awash with those.
The Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment and Romantic Revival placed science, empiricism and the average individual front and centre, in art, poetry, literature. In coffee houses, newspapers and theatre halls, people debated their beliefs.
Early intrusive technology such as the camera and gossip journalism played its role and, by 1890, lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had published a highly influential essay titled The Right to Privacy in the Harvard Law Review. “They argued individuals should possess ‘the right to be let alone’,” Jenkins says.
Entering this right into legislation over the following century would force society to acknowledge some deep injustices.
Spouses could no longer spy on each other. The right to privacy aided in the fight for the right to marry inter-racially, and the right to reproductive autonomy.
The idea that governments, by attempting to regulate sexuality, were peeping into bedrooms, eventually helped further the cause for LGBTQ+ rights.
Then the world changed again.
EAT, PRAY, DON’T POST
The internet, entwined with late-stage capitalism, has commodified every click, snack purchase and free minute spent scrolling. Individuals mine their own lives for content, inviting cameras into marriages, child-rearing, therapy, divorce.
In the age of AI, the very idea of personhood could undergo a shift: can an actor protect their likeness; an artist their creation; is AI just a machine or will it need to be recognised as more?
These machines have caused an overall weakening of our inner lives, Jenkins says. “If we’re constantly posting or scrolling, we lose the space for reflection, complexity, depth of thought.” This affects public discourse, with the result that new technology erodes both private and public life.
Larger conversations will need to yield new laws concerning digital communication, data harvesting, surveillance, algorithmic profiling, the ethics of AI, to enable a robust public sphere, and shift away from making the personal permanently public.
Reversing the erosion of our inner lives at the personal level is simpler, Jenkins says.
Read, without posting about it. Travel, without checking in online. Maintain a private diary. Draw boundaries and adhere to them. The right to privacy isn’t a problem of technology and legal fixes alone, Jenkins points out. Simple norms can shift the culture back, at least a little.
