Why privacy keeps dying: the trouble with talk about the end of privacy

ABSTRACT

It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for decades, but there has never been a near consensus about its causes. Second, unlike other endist talk (the end of art or history, etc.), privacy endism appears ongoing and not period specific. Finally, our explanation of the persistence and idiosyncrasy of claims to the end of privacy focuses on Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 negative conception of privacy as ‘the right to be let alone’: namely, modern privacy talk has always been endist because the right to privacy was born out of the conditions for its violation, not its realization. The conclusion comments on implications of that basic proposition.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy
• endism
• rights
• discourse
• press

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Birnhack, Bill Dutton, Paul Frosh, Brian Loader, Helen Nissenbaum, Michael Zimmer, the 2014–2015 fellows of the Oklahoma Center for Humanities at the University of Tulsa, and the anonymous journal reviewers for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes on contributors

Nicholas A. John is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [email: [email protected]]

Benjamin Peters is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Tulsa and affiliated faculty at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221.toc, accessed on 4/3/2016.

2. See http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601970825,00.html, accessed on 4/3/2016.

3. See https://www.schneier.com/news-055.html, accessed on 4/3/2016.

4. See http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic.

5. This is not to say that these changes spread evenly or impacted members of all social strata in the same way. By way of example, richer families had houses with separate bedrooms before poorer families. For this reason, privacy has long been suspected of being a bourgeois value.