Privacy, Power, and the Self

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Bibliography How can you condense the millions of words that have been written about privacy into a blog post? The answer is that you can’t; all you can do is point at a few landmarks, like a tour guide trying to show people Toronto in an afternoon. What Privacy Is Not Privacy is not a timeless natural right. As Sarah Igo describes in her history of privacy in America, what is and isn’t private has expanded in some directions and contracted in others over the past century with no consistent underlying principle. Sexual behavior between consenting adults was legally public well into the twentieth century, in the sense that it was criminally regulated. For much of the same time, medical records were routinely shared between physicians, employers, and insurers without…