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The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

In a sense, privacy is a medium, like air; we live within its embrace, to varying degrees, from our earliest days until our last. Its existence allows us to negotiate and contextualize our political and personal connections— in our relationship with the state as citizens, and with each other in our day-to-day dealings. It is a barrier that mediates the extent to which each of us is known or unknown to those around us. Moreover, like the air itself, we rarely see privacy, or its value, clearly. As Jerome observed, it takes a mountain view to confirm the existence of air, by providing a perspective that forces us to account for it. Similarly, statutes, judicial rulings, and technological and commercial innovations implicating privacy each allow us a perspective on the extent to which we actually control information about ourselves. Such are the benchmarks that Igo has selected to chart the shifting views of privacy in modern American life, and she has chosen wisely. At bottom, privacy for Igo is a vehicle for exploring the historical development of Americans’ sense of themselves vis-à-vis others. Though the full dimensions of privacy may remain elusive, she notes that “the same imprecision that vexes theorists [has] proved to be privacy’s true political value” over time (12). Her aim is to trace the way in which privacy has served as a “highly flexible container for social thought” (12), from elite society’s late nineteenth-century call for new legal rights to protect against intrusion by a public seeking to know through later efforts to curb invasive commercial marketing to the modern anxieties about the extent to which the government knows us. Igo chronicles the shifting attitudes toward privacy in the United States across the last dozen decades. She begins with the technological innovations in surveillance that led Warren and Brandeis to advocate in the pages of the Harvard Law Review for a “right to be let alone.” She then proceeds apace through the decades to the journalistic exposure of the behavioral marketing techniques of the 1960s, and, ultimately, the civil rights efforts of more recent years, aimed at making minorities of all kinds known to the public. Throughout, Igo gives due attention to U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut, which deemed the marital bedroom a constitutionally protected “zone of privacy,” and Katz v. United States, which extended the constitutional protection against governmental searches and seizures to all reasonable expectations of privacy. But, unlike other developments that she discusses, these cases were not simply emblematic of attitudinal changes about privacy; rather, they literally changed the rules. Legislative responses to perceived privacy intrusions,