Privacy is a protean concept: its meaning changes depending on the historical and cultural context. As a seventeenth-century preacher reminded his flock: ‘The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy’ – it is not always considered a social good – but from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century, privacy had come to be thought of as a necessary space free of interference from religious and state authority and the right to retreat from public scrutiny.
By the nineteenth century, privacy was held up as a sacred value required by the modern self. As two Bostonian lawyers, Samuel Warren and John Brandeis, argued in the most famous article in privacy history, ‘The Right to Privacy’, published in the Harvard Law Review. Warren and Brandeis called for ‘a right to be let alone’, to defend the ‘sacred precincts of private and domestic life’ from the invasion of the public world. ‘The intensity of modern life, attendant upon advancing civilisation’, they lamented, ‘have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual.’ The Victorian idea of privacy was tied to the private sphere, which was close to being worshipped.
Come the late 1960s and early 1970s, that idea of privacy held rhetorical purchase, such as when, in a national radio address in the spring of 1974, President Nixon (somewhat ironically considering given the Watergate Scandal that would force him to resign in August of that same year), called for new privacy rights: ‘In the first half of this century, Mr Justice Brandeis called privacy “the right most valued by civilised men”… In the last half of this century, we must also make it the right that is most protected.’
As evidenced in the response to Johnson’s proposed database and the anxieties about eavesdropping, something else was being described in this period in the language of privacy. There was a concern with privacy threatened by technology but not the self-invasion of the private sphere or the intrusion into it.
One reason for this development is because of public attitudes. Research commissioned by the Younger Commission discovered a generational divide over the concept of privacy. Those aged 45 and over described privacy as: ‘keeping your own private affairs to yourself’; ‘other people minding their own business’; and ‘freedom from nosy parkers’. The home, for them, was still a castle. They strongly defended the borders of the private sphere. They sounded like Warren and Brandeis.