Privacy from a historical perspective

"The first chapter is on history, written by Ronald Kroeze and Sjoerd Keulen. They argue that the history of privacy shows that privacy is an ever-changing and context-dependent phenomenon. As such, opportunities for and threats to privacy are highly related to broader societal developments. Several of these broader developments are been distinguished and discussed and we briefly sum them up here. First, changing morals, cultural and religious ideas about the individual, family, household, and ‘natural’ relationships have had an effect on individual privacy. Second, privacy has been influenced throughout history by political changes, especially the rise of the idea of private individual rights and the acceptance of an individual sphere that the state, society, and legal system should respect and protect. Furthermore, the development of liberal-democracies – with individual freedom and the non-interference principle as its core values – and the internationalization of human rights in the past decades, have had a big impact on the politics and history of privacy. Finally, as the first but certainly not the only chapter to address the fact that technological changes, especially in the field of infrastructure, media, and communication, have had and will have great impact on privacy matters. For those that started the book (and the chapter) expecting a definite overview of the history of privacy, the chapter may serve as a ‘training phase’: rather than provide accounts and definitions, the chapters of this book afford insight into the disciplinary lives of privacy, and how each discipline takes care of the subject."