Love Big Brother

Posted Jul 11, 2008 0:45 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

When the telephone became commonplace and the phone companies started publishing directories with subscribers' phone numbers, was there an uproar over privacy concerns?

No. It was so normal that phone companies sold the "unlisted number" as a product. Today, most people would consider that blackmail. And before telephones, there was a practice that people today would find even more shocking: cities published directories with everyone's home address.

Even in my lifetime, driver licensing information was considered public and anyone could get my address, birth date, and driving record. I can also remember when everyone in a doctor's office could easily overhear other patients' health problems. When reverse-charge telephone service was invented (1970's?) no one questioned for a minute that the company you called got to know your phone number. By the 1990s, that was a huge issue with Caller ID.

Information privacy per se (as opposed to keeping certain things secret because of specific threats) is a recent phenomenon. Part of the reason may be that there is more power available now to process and exploit that information. But I think a lot of it just might be social evolution, like you see attitudes toward sex change with the times.