The Standard The Secret History
"After all, privacy is inherently vague. Neither decades of legal cases nor these two books have come up with a definition on which most would agree. And we are hypocrites about it – we have an endless curiosity for personal details about others even as we zealously protect our own."

"Those already in a frenzy over technology and privacy, though, should get out the smelling salts: Privacy-disrupting technologies are only going to get better (or worse). Wealthy, concerned parents will doubtless soon be able to equip their kids with global positioning system implants and send remote controlled video cameras scurrying after them. Soon after that, not-so-wealthy parents will be able to track their children, as well as anyone who wants to keep tabs on someone. We will all be swirling haplessly in a giant fishbowl."

NPR: All Things Considered Voyeurism
"Tonight, CBS debuts a new reality television show called Big Brother. Twenty-eight cameras and sixty microphone will record the every move of ten people living in a house. This show is in the same vein as Survivor, The Real World, and The 1900 House -- all of which are examples of how technology has brought about a much more public voyeur. Millions of people are gathering around their televisions sets to peer into the lives of others. Bob Mondello has an overview of how the term voyeurism came about through motion pictures. And Noah talks with Robin Rimbaud , aka "Scanner," about the new techno voyeur, scanning people's cell phone conversations."

The New York Times Magazine Voyeurism for the Entire Family
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"George Orwell was a loser.

As a friend observes, if Orwell could really see into the future, he would have registered Big Brother as a brand. He would have known that the ominous specter he raised in "1984" would, by 2000, become a crowd-pleasing entertainment franchise."

"The truth is that the phenomenal appeal of "Survivor" and "Big Brother" is the news right now -- perhaps not coincidentally at a time when the shows' promos bleed into amateur videos of real-life wilding in Central Park and Americans are said to be alarmed about Internet invasions of their privacy. We may learn more about the country from these TV series than we will from the political parties' version of "reality" television (the infomercial conventions, which will get far less network air time)."

"This would all be harmless were we certain that the line between "reality television" and actual reality is universally clear. But TV's exploitation of the Central Park videos of packs of men mauling dozens of women after the National Puerto Rican Day Parade makes one wonder. Though the videos were broadcast over and over for gratuitous titillation long after they ceased to qualify as fresh news, the voyeuristic overkill aroused no more public protest than the prospect of "Big Brother."

Feed Daily
"PRIVACY'S a funny thing. The word itself never appears in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights, or in the Declaration of Independence, and still most Americans believe that, like their other freedoms, the right to privacy is inalienable. And there's something to that belief. Judge Brandeis made the first attempt to codify personal privacy rights in 1890, when he famously wrote that people have "the right to enjoy life – the right to be let alone," and juries, journalists, private citizens, and public figures have been wrangling over that notion of privacy the right to be let alone ever since. With Wednesday's release of a videotape documenting the horrors at Columbine High School, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department has, probably unwittingly, reinvigorated this long-running debate."

redux [04.30.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
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"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

"While issues of privacy have been far more debated in this day and age then environmental concerns were in Carson's era (for instance, polls consistently show that the public does care very much about privacy, both online and off), Garfinkel's work is the first time a writer has decisively and persuasively marshaled all the information together to show how our right to privacy is under constant attack, often by people who claim to have our best interests at heart. "