the development of the concept of privacy

My sister uses old photographs as an ingredient in her art.  One archive is a collection of glass plate negatives, mostly posed studio portraits of Danes.  Danes in suits, Danes in dresses, Danish children in little Danish suits and dresses.  All of them with the same fixed dour countenance.

 

Their letters suggest a more positive outlook on life.  The problem, it seems, was a photograph required an exposure of about ten seconds. It was an expensive process that you only splurged for on big days - Easter, birthdays and weddings.  You have to get it right the first time. Few can maintain a smile that long, but dour is easy.   Try it.  

 

It was a huge improvement from the earlier daguerreotype.  There's a story that Samuel Morse of telegraph fame visited Louis Daguerre's studio in Paris.  Looking at examples of this wonderful new photography, Morse was struck that even the busiest sections of Paris showed no human activity.  Daguerre patiently explained twenty minute exposures were at fault.  The streaks of moving people, carriages and horses only offered a slight blur on the streets.

 

While the Danes were exposing plates my sister would ultimately use, George Eastman had been working on making photography practical.  Around 1885 he had a film fast enough that an average exposure outdoors took just a fraction of a second - a short enough time that a smile didn't change.  He kept working and developed a series of smaller and smaller cameras that were increasingly easy to use. In a few years he had a small camera that was so small and so fast that a subject might not realize their photograph was being taken.  And then came the Kodak Brownie..  a small, fast, very easy to use camera that anyone could use.  It cost one dollar - about $30 in today's money - and came with a roll of film. The camera shown is the Model 2 - an improved camera that was introduced in 1900 at a much higher price point - two dollars.   Snapshots became a national craze.   People were taking photos of others without permission.  One woman even found a sack of grain at a store bore her unauthorized image.  Kodak fiend and Kodaker became insults.  Tabloid newspapers made a good businesses publishing unauthorized society pictures along with those of women in compromising dress - bathing suits and worse. People were fascinated by widely available photography and were doing it on their own, but a boundary was emerging without a much guidance. 

 

The 1870s also saw the wide scale use of telegraphy.  Moving a message from point A to point B usually wasn't direct.  Instead a message from Boston to Minneapolis might first go to New York City where a telegrapher copied it by hand and gave a piece of paper to another telegrapher with a wire to Chicago.  A similar exchange would take place before a connection was made to Minneapolis.  Some of these messages had important business information and there was a good deal of leakage.  Some companies began to use ciphers as a result.  

 

The telephone began to spread beyond the boundaries of business after WWI.  Operators could and did listen.  Many local exchanges were party lines where anyone could listen to anything up to a dozen people might be saying.  The telephone also revolutionized dating.  Scheduled meetings in the parlor of the girl's family could now be arranged to be somewhere else.   The concept of the date as a destination came about in the twenties and the automobile only made it easier. 

 

Society was going through huge changes.  Much more information was available in a variety of forms. Sometimes we wanted it to be made available and sometimes we wanted to protect it.  In 1890 two Harvard Law student, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published The Right to Privacy in the Harvard Law Review.  It's an astonishing piece.  Clearly written and still regularly cited.   The concept of a right to privacy was beginning to emerge in America.

 

It's a delicate balance that is in many ways a way of looking at how society comes to grips with changing technologies.  The historians I've talked to suggest no one talked about a right to privacy before the Civil War. Rather there was a concept of the home being a castle that an owner had a right to protect.  Information and who has access changed that. 

 

It's a double edged sword.  We want .. we need .. some of our information to be known in order to function in society.  When Social Security numbers were first issued, marginalized segments of society - African Americans for example - proudly displayed their number for all to see as proof of their being part of American society.  On the other hand moral crusaders were invading (legally) US Mail and in the 1950s what happened in the bedroom became an issue for the Supreme Court in Griswold v Connecticut.   Some historians refer to that event as accidentally confirming the right to privacy in America. 

 

And now we have the Internet and an exchange of a number of services in return for information about us .. information that we often know little about.  The information may rightly or wrongly describe us and it is often used without the correct context.  It might have implicit or explicit bias.  It is then used with a sea of other information about us and others to create a set of digital judgements which can be used for targeted ads or for darker purposes.  This gets fascinating and deserves another post or three.  

 

Technology usually outstrips the development of a social norm which usually precedes law.   It's messy and companies are now betting their futures on it.  It's interesting that one of the largest companies in the world has decided a right to privacy by  the end user of their products is a core value.  Of course it isn't completely bulletproof, but it is diametrically opposed to many of the other players.  All of this while people generally unaware of the issues.   

Comments

[Jheri]

Please continue! This is soooo fascinating!

[Brian]

Very interesting and important subject. It gets big in a hurry, too, with nation states (like China) now enabling massive surveillance of citizens, as if the Panopticon were the model of the future. The state of "always being watched" reduces one to being the subject of the watcher. Hard to be innovative or creative in that state. It's a deeply political issue IMO. My current reading: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/18/why-do-we-care-so-much-about-privacy

Yes, please continue. Very interested in your thoughts.

[steve crandall]

Yes .. I have a lot of thoughts on the Chinese system and the notion of reputation systems and the interesting Google and Facebook might have in them...