What ever happened to privacy? The simple right to be left alone? Surveillance cameras track our movements. Governments monitor our phone calls, e-mails, and Internet habits. Insurance companies know what drugs we take. Banks and credit agencies keep tabs on our smallest purchases. And new technologies—which gather, store, and share information as never before—have made all of this possible.
But, as the acclaimed social thinker Wolfgang Sofsky shows in this brief and powerful defense of privacy, neither technology nor fears of terrorism deserve all the blame. Rather, through indifference and the desire for attention, we have been accomplices in the loss of our privacy. When we aren't resigning ourselves to privacy's disappearance as the inevitable price of living in a new age, we are eagerly embracing opportunities to divulge personal information to people we know—and, increasingly, to people we don't.
Dramatically demonstrating how much privacy we have already surrendered, Sofsky describes a day in the life of an average modern citizen—in other words, a person under almost constant scrutiny. He also briefly traces the changing status of privacy from ancient Rome to today, explains how liberty and freedom of thought depend on privacy, and points to some of the places where privacy is under greatest threat, from health to personal space.
Privacy is a timely and compelling reminder of just how important privacy is—and just how devastating its loss would be.
Wolfgang Sofsky's books include Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War (Granta) and The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton).
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Traces 1 Chapter 2: Power and Privacy 11 Chapter 3: Retrospectives 23 Chapter 4: Freedom and Privacy 30 Chapter 5: Territories of the Self 36 Chapter 6: Secrets of the Body 49 Chapter 7: Private Spaces 65 Chapter 8: Property 79 Chapter 9: Information 94 Chapter 10: Freedom of Thought 109 Notes 131
What People are Saying About This
Hans-Peter Muller
Writing in a readable and fluid style, Wolfgang Sofsky shows just how important privacy is to modern life and, at the same time, just how endangered privacy has become. A reminder that to defend privacy is to defend democracy, individualism, and the good life, this book will interest anyone who has ever felt uneasy about how much governments and corporations know about us. — Hans-Peter Muller, Humboldt University, Berlin
From the Publisher
"Writing in a readable and fluid style, Wolfgang Sofsky shows just how important privacy is to modern life and, at the same time, just how endangered privacy has become. A reminder that to defend privacy is to defend democracy, individualism, and the good life, this book will interest anyone who has ever felt uneasy about how much governments and corporations know about us."—Hans-Peter Müller, Humboldt University, Berlin
