Privacy Concerns make a Comeback

From 1800 to the 1920s, the word “privacy” appeared in publications at a fairly constant but low frequency. Then the rate of citation increased somewhat between 1920 and 1960 followed by a very steep rise (except for mild dip in the early 1980s) through the year 2000.

I gleaned this information using the Google Ngram viewer at:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=privacy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cprivacy%3B%2Cc0

The way it works is explained nicely at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer

Basically, the Google search engine explores its book data base for any word or phrase you enter and creates a graph which displays the relative frequency of that word in its huge books database over the time period you choose. According to Wikipedia:

“The word-search database was created by Google Labs, based originally on 5.2 million books, published between 1500 and 2008, containing 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese. “

For example, language researchers have used Ngram to study trends in “mood” words (like exhilarated/apathetic, cheerful/depressed, etc.) and have evidence that American English has become more emotional in the last 50 years. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0059030

If you’d like to play with Ngram, you can also examine how the usage of the words: “kindergarten” and “nursery school” were replaced by “child care’” over the last half-century as well as many other examples at: https://books.google.com/ngrams/info

So, other than the Ngram data, what evidence do I have to make the claim, “Privacy makes a Comeback” ? Unfortunately, the other evidence is weak; it’s anecdotal but since it’s based on personal experience, it’s very convincing --- to me. Based on the reactions of students at SUNY Plattsburgh from the 1990s to pretty much the present, I have observed the issue of privacy wax and wane but the underlying trend is that there has been a growing unconcern amongst our youth about privacy. They are neither happy nor unhappy about the assault on privacy from both the government and the corpocracy; they are merely apathetic.

But, to balance youth’s apathy, I think there’s a growing concern amongst the next generation --- the Millennials. I see more and more articles and books written by them that decry the loss of privacy. A specific example is the book by Julia Angwin, “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance”. (Now there’s a title that almost eliminates the need to read the book!). A short version can be found in the article in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times March 3, 2014 edition, “Has Privacy Become a Luxury Good?” by Angwin. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/opinion/has-privacy-become-a-luxury-good.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=1)

She begins the essay with a nice hook, “Last year, I spent more than $22oo and countless hours trying to protect my privacy.” Angwin goes on to describe how corporations and governments are invading her privacy as well as yours and mine: Google tailors its ads to content of the text in your emails. British Intelligence collected Yahoo video webcam chats of millions of users not even suspected of any illegal activities --- unsurprisingly, many were sexually explicit. Facebook allows/sells marketers access to your status updates unless you take steps to change the default from ‘Public’ to, say, ‘Friends’. Even seemingly innocuous news websites auction off your personal data before the page loads...the better to target their ads to you, my dear. And, if you’re still not convinced, just type, “creepy or useful” into your favorite search engine.

All of this is to say that it does appear that privacy is being taken more seriously by the general public and, no surprise, there is a level of secrecy practiced by those who would exploit our privacy. What’s the difference between “secrecy’ and “privacy”? The best example I’ve run across is this: “It’s no secret as to what we do when we go into a bathroom, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want privacy.”