Seek and hide : the tangled history of the right to privacy
Amy Gajda (Author)
The story of the fitful development of the right to privacy - and its battle against the public's right to know - across American history. There's hardly a hotter topic than the desire to constrain tech companies like Facebook from exploiting our personal data, or to keep Alexa from spying on you. Privacy has also provoked constitutional crisis (presidential tax returns) while Justice Clarence Thomas seeks to remove the protection of journalists who publish the truth about public officials. Is privacy under deadly siege, or actually surging? The answer is both - but that's doubly dangerous, as the legal expert author shows in this book. Too little privacy means that unwanted exposure by those who deal in and publish secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy and shut down inquiry, and return us to the time before movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo opened eyes to hidden truths. We are not the first generation to grapple with that clash, to worry that new technologies and fraying social mores pose an existential threat to our privacy while recognizing the value in knowing certain things. This book carries us from the Gilded Age, when the concept of a right to privacy by name first entered American law and society, to the early twenty-first century, when the law allows a Silicon Valley titan like Peter Thiel to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Disturbingly, the author shows that the original concern was not about intrusions into the lives of ordinary folks, but that the wealthy and powerful should not have their dignity assaulted by the wretches of the popular press like Nellie Bly. This book reminds us to remember the lessons of history: that such a seemingly innocent call can also be used to restrict essential freedoms to a democracy - because it already has. -- Adapted from publisher's description
Print Book, English, 2022
Viking, [New York, New York], 2022