David Vincent, PhD The Paradox of Privacy

The death of privacy was frst pronounced in the late 1960s. The spreading use of mainframe computers threatened a world in which all personal secrets could be held by central bureaucracies. Where the great paper-based demographic and welfare systems had stored only discrete aspects of a person’s life, now machines could connect the fragments of information into a complete subject, who no longer had control over their use.

The arrival of the internet, the personal computer and mobile devices from the 1980s onwards revived the prophecies of doom. In scholarly monographs and popular journalism privacy was consigned to the past. Campaigners protested; Silicon Valley celebrated. Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, told journalists in 1999, ‘You have zero privacy anyway.’

The sense of pessimism was deepened by Edward Snowden in June 2013. His material fnally democratised the debate.

Specialist commentators had long been concerned about the scope of the surveillance operations of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and their interactions with commercial network providers.

After Snowden, everyone was worried. A recent survey of found that only 5% of Americans were unaware of his allegations. The consequence was a collapse in public trust: ‘across the board, there is a universal lack of confdence in the security of everyday communication channels –particularly when it comes to the use of online tools’ (Mary Madden, Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era (2014). p. 23).

Over the last half century privacy has acquired a zombie status, forever killed by the digital revolution, only to rise up with an axe through its head to be destroyed once again.

The same post-Snowden surveys report no reduction in the use of the media which are now seen to be so vulnerable to surveillance. There is widespread apprehension about the security of emails, yet the average teenager now exchanges 40-50 messages a day.

The internet providers are trying to reassure their customers and increase the use of encryption, but in in spite of their apparent concern and the absence of a signifcant reform of the security agencies, their share prices have remained unaffected.

The seeming paradox of bottomless pessimism and increasing use derives from four characteristics of privacy, which are frequently lost to sight amidst the intensity of the debate about the digital revolution.

In the frst place, privacy was never conceived as an irreducible possession, which was either wholly owned or forever lost. As far back as the late middle ages we fnd households taking their neighbours to court for infringement of their expectation that conversations should not be overheard or activities spied upon.

But with un-curtained and mostly unglazed windows, fimsy interior walls, and crowded interiors, such ambitions were at best relative. Creating the opportunity of exchanging personal confdences was a matter of constant effort and ingenuity.

Always there was the threat of eavesdropping, yet always there was a possibility of fnding a quiet moment amidst the bustle of the household, particularly as the number of specialised rooms increased in the early modern period.

The front door, which from the beginning of domestic architecture has served as a frontier of privacy, could let people out as well as in, with gardens and the countryside beyond an additional arena of secluded conversation.

Privacy was and has remained work, with endless minor defeats and victories in the struggle to control personal communication.

Not until the post-1945 declarations of Human Rights was privacy formally accorded the status of a human right, but even here its relativity was preserved. Clause 8.1 of the European Convention, enshrined in British law by the Human Rights Act of 1998, guarantees the right to private and family life; clause 8.2 lists the exceptions, including the state’s overriding requirements in respect of national security, serious crime and ‘economic wellbeing’.

Secondly, privacy has always been conditioned by communication. From at least the ffteenth century onwards, protected face-to-face discourse has been supplemented by devices of virtual privacy.

Correspondence became a means of maintaining intimate relationships over distance, frst for the educated minority, and those, like Margaret Paston, who afford scribes to write and read their messages. By the eighteenth century, as Susan Whyman has shown, the practice had reached far down into society, and with the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, the machinery was in place for a limitless expansion in cheap, reliable intercourse.

By that time the telegraph was under development, and from the mid-1870s, electronic conversation became possible.

From the outset, those who engaged in forms of virtual privacy recognised that beneft was accompanied by risk. Before the creation of a national postal service, letters were entrusted to travelling friends or employees, who might or might not deliver as requested.

The physical manifestation of the message meant that there was no guarantee that during or after delivery the letter would fall into the wrong hands, and the physical separation of the interlocutors introduced an irreducible element of doubt into the meanings derived from the exchange.

Once the state began to provide a service to the civilian population, the danger of government espionage was readily apparent. Legislative safeguards were introduced from the 1710 Post Offce Act onwards, but these only concerned the behaviour of postal employees; the state reserved the right, through to the present day, to open letters by warrant in the interests of what it believed to be national security. When it was caught intercepting mail on behalf of the Austrian Government in 1844, just after democratising the service through the penny post, there was an immense public controversy, but the use of the correspondence continued to rise.

Those engaging in the expanding realm of virtual privacy sought to manage risk by adopting a range of devices to minimise the danger of exposure.

They wrote in terms that only the respondent could fully understand. With the introduction of the telegraph, which required the operator to read the message, the modern devices of codes and encryption began their development.

Thus it is that those who have looked closely at the seeming exhibitionist privacy of teens and their digital intercourse have found that without instruction or conscious learning they have developed a wide range of techniques for controlling the exposure of their personal secrets. As a recent survey found, ‘one of the ways that people cope with the challenge to their privacy online is to employ multiple strategies for managing identity and reputation across different networks and transactions. As previous fndings … have suggested, users bounce back and forth between different levels of disclosure depending on the context’ (Madden, 2014, p. 5).

Fully to comprehend the range of meanings embodied in a single exchange between two instant-messaging teenagers presents a still insurmountable challenge to all the algorithms of the security agencies.

This raises the third issue at the heart of the paradox of privacy, the meaning of surveillance.

The term is everywhere deployed in the debate about the impact of the digital revolution. In many studies it is embedded in an explicitly historical context. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, frst envisaged in the late eighteenth century, subsequently reworked by George Orwell in his dystopian 1984, and further theorised by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, is held to provide the model for the present regime of oversight.

Where Bentham’s prison relied upon unproven machinery and was too expensive ever to be built, now the state appears to possess both the resources and the technology to deliver his vision of inspection. However, Bentham, who derived his model from the notion of divine inspection, was collapsing fve stages of surveillance: the capacity to see, the act of seeing, the comprehension of what is seen, action on the basis of that knowledge, and a change of behaviour by the observed. T oo often in the debate about the surveillance of private behaviour, the fnal four are assumed from the possibility of the frst. All fve can of course occur, and in the minds of those in the early modern period who were earnestly engaged in private prayer with an omniscient Almighty, there was no doubt that they did.

But in our own secular world, the sequence has to be demonstrated. CCTV cameras deliver blurred images to untrained technicians, security agencies accumulate haystacks of information which obscure more than illuminate about the behaviours they seek to uncover.

And, above all, the assumed passivity of the observed, which was at the centre of Bentham’s prison and all subsequently reworkings, has only been glimpsed in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, and even then elaborate strategies of evasion were developed.

Thus it is that the surveys that report steepling levels of concern about surveillance, also reveal minimal reported levels of material invasion of privacy by those, principally mothers, teachers and potential employers, who are actually in a position to affect the subjects’ wellbeing.

Finally, there is in the current debate about privacy a constant danger of confusing the direction of change with the complex patterns of behaviour in the present and recent past.

As the technology observer John Naughton has argued, it is necessary to view the digital revolution as one element of a constantly evolving media ecosystem, in which new developments interact with but rarely displace older forms of communication, including speech and correspondence which go back to the beginnings of civilised society. The obsessive concern amongst commentators and researchers with the internet, and in particular with its use by a narrow cohort of teenage users, obscures the range and complexity of the means by which the population as a whole, even in advanced western societies, exchange intimate confdences.

As late as 2007, for instance, for UK women engaging on a daily basis in a basic form of private communication, ‘catching up with close friends or relatives’, the most common channel was ‘face-to-face conversation’ at 51%, followed at 47% by the telephone, a technology by then into its second century (Offce for National Statistics, Social Trends, No. 41 (2011), ‘Lifestyles and social participation’, p. 3). Sherry Turkle has lately published Reclaiming Conversation.

The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), which argues persuasively for the importance of face-to-face intercourse and the threats posed by talking via machines, but lacks any comprehensive survey of the range of ways in which couples and wider social networks do in fact communicate over the life course.

The pace of change has been so rapid since the late twentieth century as to create real diffculties of research methodology. It is impossible, for instance, to conduct a stable longitudinal study, fnding out how teenagers change their privacy behaviours as they grow old, holding constant a particular confguration of communication technologies.

However, there are clues in the current literature which suggest that whilst adults will express concern when asked about the security of their digital devices, that technology still only constitute a minor element in the exchange of intimacies which lie at the heart of privacy.

A recent study of online users who are married or in committed relationships found that nearly three quarters ‘said the internet has “no real impact at all” on their partnership.’ Unsurprisingly, the fgure fell with age, declining to ten per cent for those over sixty-fve (Amanda Lenhart and Maeve Duggan, Couples, the Internet, and Social Media (2014), pp. 2-3).

Even where an impact was felt, it was mostly positive, enabling couples to keep in touch when physically apart. When the mobile device was put aside, there was talk, and when the words dried up, there were all the gestures of face and body by which individuals know that they know each other. ‘After all,’ wrote Montaigne in his late sixteenth-century Essays, ‘lovers quarrel, make it up again, beg favours, give thanks, arrange secret meetings and say everything, with their eyes… And what of our eyebrows or our shoulders? None of their movements fails to talk a meaningful language which does not have to be learned, a language common to us all.’

David Vincent was an undergraduate at the University of York and gained a PhD at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge. He became Lecturer in History at Keele University in 1974, leaving as Professor of Social History and Deputy Vice Chancellor in 2003 to take up the post of Pro Vice Chancellor (Strategy and External Affairs) at the OU. Now Emeritus Professor in History, he became a full-time member of the History Department in 2010.

He was a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College 2004-11, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts.