PRIVACY AND TECHNOLOGY: LOOKING BACK

Yesterday I posted a quote taken from a Sherlock Holmes story that reflected a fascination with the private sphere. The story, first published in 1891, implied a link between the themes of the story and the new technology of the typewriter.

One of the ideas behind The New Normal is that recent technological changes are forcing us to re-negotiate the boundaries between public and private. This shift is described at greater length in Clay Shirky’s essay from the exhibition catalogue,  “Private, Public, and the Collapse of the Personal,” which looks at the role played by e-mail, the mobile phone, and ubiquitous digital technologies in re-shaping our ability to control access to our private information.

Although many of the technological developments described in Shirky’s essay are relatively recent, the link between privacy and technology has a longer history. There is no mention of privacy in the U.S. Constitution, nor in any other U.S. law prior to the invention of the Kodak handheld camera in 1888. In one of the first statements on privacy in the U.S. legal system, Justices Warren and Brandeis famously wrote that “numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’”.

The year was 1890.