The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America by Sarah Igo (review)

Sarah Igo has written a fascinating, lively, and exquisitely researched history of privacy in modern America. By the author's admission, it is not a comprehensive history (it is doubtful whether a complete account of privacy could in fact be told), but a selective study focusing on what Igo describes as "critical episodes" in privacy's history (13). Although The Known Citizen covers terrain addressed in other works, most notably, Alan Westin's 1967 study Privacy and Freedom, it nonetheless makes an important and original contribution to the growing literature on the history of privacy by tracking, in a single volume, the rise and expansion of Americans' anxieties around privacy and the shifting and often paradoxical nature of our privacy concerns.

The Known Citizen tracks the ascendance of privacy as one of the preeminent concerns of public life beginning in the late 1800s, when gossip journalism, Kodak cameras, and other "technologies of publicity" began to alter the ways that individuals were known to each other (17). Commentators and critics—most famously, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, in their 1890 article "The Right to Privacy"—claimed that their privacy was being infringed and called for a legal "right to be let alone." The subsequent public dialogue around privacy, what Igo calls "privacy talk," "frame[d] Americans' discussions about the state, their social institutions, and . . . themselves." (5). Making claims to personal privacy and lamenting the loss of privacy became a symbolic means of staking out the boundaries between the self, society, and the state in an environment where both government and private entities expressed new interests in monitoring citizens and had access to new technologies that enabled tracking, recording and surveillance.

The book skillfully charts the changing sources of our privacy woes. In the late 1800 s many Americans feared media exposures of private life, but by 1940, with the expansion of the administrative state, the government's zeal for amassing personal facts about its citizens had become formidable. Despite this, the public was tolerant of state incursions into private life that later generations would view skeptically. In one of the most original chapters, Igo describes public reactions to the Social Security program. In this pre-identity theft world, some recipients actually had their SSNs engraved on jewelry or tattooed on their bodies. The number was seen not so much as a symbol of ominous surveillance as a coveted badge of social inclusion and economic citizenship.

After the Second World War, the focus of privacy concerns turned to private actors; in particular, advertisers and employers that used new tools of psychological surveillance (personality tests and marketing research, for example) to peer into the inner workings of the mind. The postwar person "faced invasions right at the core of the self," Igo writes (102). Confronting a barrage of intrusions into seemingly every area of life, Americans in the 1960s engaged in a "veritable explosion of public discussion centered on the shrinking sphere of privacy" (141). Igo illustrates how the Supreme Court's 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, announcing a constitutional right to privacy, emerged from this privacy panic.

Despite its landmark significance, Griswold, which technically addressed the right to access contraception, was ill-suited to address privacy threats that accompanied the advent of the computer in the 1960s and 70 s. Americans suddenly found themselves unwilling possessors of extensive "digital dossiers," "enmeshed in . . .network[s]" of computerized files amassed in data banks (262).

This same period that saw a massive cultural preoccupation with privacy also witnessed an emphasis on transparency. Social movements like feminism and gay rights questioned the rationale for keeping intimate matters out of public view. In the 1970s, the shedding of secrets came to be seen both as a prerequisite to personal liberation and the creation of a more tolerant, enlightened society. "Confessional culture" was born (13). Igo describes the first television reality show in the 1970s, the rise of the memoir as a publishing genre, and...