Eugene Robinson: The End of the Right of Privacy?

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9. He's correct to foresee the end of privacy as we've known it

He would be more correct if he also historicized its origins. The problem with noting the end of privacy is usually wrapped up in not acknowledging its beginnings. The modern right to privacy is not some universal human feature that has been with us since Hammurabi, but a notion of recent vintage, tied to all kinds of culturally and historically contingent factors, including, of course, technological factors. Anyone who has been paying attention to any of this for the last 20 years knows that data tracking and storage technologies have steadily eroded a concept of privacy, and a practice of information gathering. Of course privacy will be different in 40 or 100 years. That should go without saying.

For awesome primers on some of these questions, I'd suggest

Elizabeth Neill's Rites of Privacy and the Privacy Trade: On the Limits of Protection for the Self (McGill, 2001)

and

Julie Cohen's excellent Configuring the Network Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale, 2012), available via Creative Commons license here: http://www.juliecohen.com/page5.php