”Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life”

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the public’s right “to control how their thoughts, sentiments, and emotions were published.”

When Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer, offered up his own view of privacy in 2009 by saying, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he was simply channeling an old belief that the devil might call on you when you were on your own. 

But Jenkins doesn’t single out the internet as the lone reason privacy may be under attack in the 21st century.

Reality television has a lot to answer for, she said. Starting back in the 1970s when TV’s Loud family aired their dirty laundry on the air, viewers have seen plenty of petty squabbles and bad behavior over a 50-year period, said Jenkins.

Writing from her home in England, a country with a love of security cameras, as any fan of modern British TV crime shows will attest, Jenkins said privacy concerns over having so many cameras to capture public activity have diminished over the years in the interests of public safety.

Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable, noted reviewer Rupert Christiansen in the British paper, The Telegraph. “Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing, “ he wrote.