Privacy Settings

How much to conceal, how much to reveal—these are vexed questions today, when our data is being comprehensively plundered and we are served up to the gaze of governments, corporations, and our peers. But such questions were just as pressing in the past, as historian Sarah E. Igo shows in her luminous new book, The Known Citizen. For a century and a half, people in this country have been arguing at high volume about privacy. They've argued about sex, data, crime, fame, science, technology, advertising, the state, the mind, and, ultimately, the boundaries of the self. Plus ça change. Yet there's one moment that resounds with special force. That moment is Watergate—the episode that established the terms of our own times.