Privacy is a historical blip

Picture me, if you will, on a Cornish beach this summer, doing something generations of British men have done. I refer, of course, to the awkward towel-dance: the corners of a small beach towel tweezed at hip-height between the fingers of one hand, while with the other hand I attempt to extricate myself from a damp pair of swimming shorts. I resemble a drunken baby giraffe. The hips gyrate; the balance shifts; the towel gapes...

What on earth is all this about? Why, I’m protecting my privacy. The moment, in these negotiations, when a corner of the towel escapes the thumb and the unthinkable happens may come to be known as an “Ashley Madison.” As in: “OMG. I totally Ashley Madisoned on the beach. I half-mooned the whole west side of Whitstable. My children still aren’t speaking to me.”

The sort of privacy you protect with a towel and the sort of privacy you protect with a 256-bit block cypher aren’t all that different. We are accustomed to the idea that many things personal to us—be they body parts, thoughts and feelings, the records of our associations or data about our health, wealth and sexual preferences—should remain our own, on the analogy (perhaps) with property. Privacy, and the loss of it, are guiding preoccupations of the internet age: as we voluntarily share our data on social media, allow it to be harvested from us unwittingly and fall victim to leaks and hacks, the whole idea of privacy as a sustainable state is vanishing. To extend the analogy with property, you could say that the assault on copyright which is transforming the creative industries is part of the same process.

Children of the 20th century tend to feel privacy as an established norm from which this process represents an unprecedented and alarming deviation. And that’s true: but it is not a very long-established norm. The expectation of privacy, “fundamental human right” or no, may turn out to be nothing more than a blip in human history.

Anthropologists talk of a distinction between shame societies, where the moral order is sustained by the eyes of the tribe, and guilt societies, where taboos are internalised and conscience is king. The whiggish version of this, at least in the west, sees a shift with the Reformation. Protestant ideas about inwardness, an unmediated relationship with the deity, private diaries and non-communal reading, various innovations in early modern architecture and so on, led us into a world where, if no man was an island, he at least had island-like features.

But for many, many thousands of years before that, the general assumption for the mass of humanity was that you would eat, sleep and wash, communicate and fornicate, do business and do your business pretty much in public. And as for copyright, that was barely a thing 300 years ago, let alone 3,000.

Not all forms of privacy are such a recent invention, of course: the Old Testament gives implicit sanction to the towel-dance, and many cultures have taboos on genital display of one sort or another (albeit Lenny Kravitz didn’t seem to get the memo). And secrecy—ad hoc, rather than culturally normalised—has been a thing since the first monkey hid a banana behind his back and made a “what me? No bananas here!” face.

But as big data begins to erode our sandcastle of privacy, we may have to recognise that the tide is coming in—and take comfort that, in the long run, it leaves the beach more or less the same as it always was. Bathers of the world, untie: you have nothing to lose but your towels.