The struggle for privacy

In 2009, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt asserted, ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’. It was the kind of sinister, technocratic remark that neatly captures our age – an age in which privacy is treated less as a right than as a cause for suspicion.

It’s the mindset that sociologist Tiffany Jenkins takes aim at in her superb new book, Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life – a bold and necessary intervention in an era in which the private self is being actively dismantled.

Strangers and Intimates is not a work of nostalgia, harking back to some golden age of private life. Instead, it traces the historical roots of our current malaise with forensic precision and admirable clarity. Jenkins shows that the distinction between public and private life is not a given, but a hard-won achievement. Born out of the Protestant Reformation and further developed during the Enlightenment, the private sphere was once a refuge from the public world, a space in which to think and reflect freely. A space in which one developed one’s autonomy. That space, Jenkins argues, is now vanishing before our eyes – and we’re no longer even sure what we’ve lost.

Jenkins does more than simply echo the concerns of contemporary digital-rights campaigners, whose interest in privacy is often limited to recent concepts like data protection. She takes a more historical view. She shows how ideas like privacy, citizenship and liberty were forged in particular historical struggles – she reminds us that these concepts are not mere abstractions.

Every page offers fresh revelations. For example, we learn that John Stuart Mill’s interest in the private self developed from his passion for the poetry of William Wordsworth. Or that the early Suffragettes demanded privacy for women, through their resistance to state power over their families. In Jenkins’s telling, privacy and an ever deepening sense of selfhood are the products of a long struggle.

Jenkins writes with calm authority, and avoids the hyperbole that so often clouds contemporary discussions of privacy. There are no glib comparisons between Instagram and Stalinism here, just sharp, insightful analysis.

Jenkins doesn’t spare the ideologues, either. She takes aim at the radical feminist mantra that ‘the personal is political’ – an idea that turned private relationships into arenas of political struggle and opened the door to state intervention in the most intimate parts of life. The family, once a refuge from political intrusion, was suddenly reimagined as a site of oppression in need of regulation. Nowhere is this mindset more apparent than in the Scottish government’s infamous Named Persons scheme (mercifully abandoned in 2019), which sought to appoint a state guardian for every child. This would effectively have granted the government a role inside the family home.

For Jenkins, privacy went into further retreat when the left abandoned its commitment to social transformation in favour of a politics of the ‘authentic self’. It reduced freedom to self-expression, and turned the private realm into a stage.

The result of this erosion of privacy is a culture in which even what is said behind closed doors is no longer safe from officialdom. Recent hate-speech laws in Scotland, where you can be prosecuted for offensive remarks made in your own home, are proof that the state no longer recognises any meaningful boundary between public and private. These cultural and ideological shifts, Jenkins argues, laid the groundwork for the culture of self-surveillance that now defines modern life.

And it is this inward turn, this obsession with emotional transparency and identity performance, that opened the door to today’s reality TV and social-media culture. Jenkins is clear that it is not technology that is the cause of the fall of privacy. Without a society already willing to commodify the private self, and turn it into an object of public consumption, the smartphone wouldn’t have had half as much impact on our private lives as it has.

The final chapter, tellingly titled ‘Saving Private Life’, isn’t just a lament. It’s also a rallying cry. Jenkins argues that we must recover both a vibrant public realm and a protected private one. Without privacy, there is no space for introspection, no ground for dissent and no chance of cultivating an inner life that isn’t shaped by social approval. ‘The ongoing externalisation of the self’, she warns, ‘threatens our capacity for introspection and contemplation’. What we need is not more data-protection laws or digital detoxes – we need to rediscover the value of being left alone.

Strangers and Intimates treats its readers as adults, capable of thinking historically, politically and philosophically about what kind of society we want to live in. Jenkins offers no comforting illusions, but she does offer something far more valuable – a defence of the private self as the bedrock of a truly free society. In an age that confuses confession with authenticity and surveillance with safety, it is a message we’d do well to heed.

Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, by Tiffany Jenkins, is published by Picador.

Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.