Reviews in American History

The New York Times recently published a sweeping exposé of the bounty hunters in our pockets.¹ By design (for tech companies) and default (to us), our smartphone apps track our every movement. Long after we've stepped out of the Uber, our desires persist as commodified data ready to sell to advertisers, retailers, and even hedge funds. If you aren't paying, you are the product—as an emerging cliché goes. But perhaps at some point a dependence becomes so deep that it is no longer pathological but constitutive: through the compulsive use of technology we become more of ourselves, discovering, inventing, and accessing the desires that define us. Such a belief has united technological utopians from Jeff Bezos to Isaac Asimov, who dreamed of a future in which technology would tend lovingly to the unstated desires of consumers. In a 1973 essay, Asimov predicted that data-driven knowledge would usher in a new era of individualism, an era of curated product recommendations "so likely to be of interest to [the consumer] and to be slanted to his particular needs that even if he does not buy, he will feel that someone has gone to the trouble of knowing what he might want." (p. 238) And, at any rate, you've likely already forgotten about that Times article anyway, assimilating its revelations as just another cost of participation in a convenience-driven consumer economy. Or perhaps that twinge of concern was quickly extinguished by the dopamine rush of a "like" on social media.

There is an amnesiac quality to debates over privacy. For the past 150 years, Americans have routinely identified crises of privacy only to be mollified or cowed into the belief that previously known degrees of control and solitude are unrecoverable. And yet, privacy's contested place within American politics has been entrenched by a tension fundamental to capitalist democracies: the insistent surveillance of corporate life and liberalism's veneration of the individual subject. Sarah Igo's The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America is a sweeping and insightful probe of the paradox at the heart of privacy. Americans have at once desired exposure of the self—and demanded acceptance of diverse sexual and familial arrangements—even as [End Page 250] they have feared the dissolution of the boundary between the individual and society. In short, debates over privacy have long been at the heart of modern American citizenship.

Igo surveys a dizzying range of debates over privacy that all center around a cluster of questions. To what extent ought an American be knowable to bureaucracies, corporations, law enforcement, scientific researchers, doctors, schools, and algorithms? Where can an individual find refuge from a prying society? What parts of ourselves demand exposure, and what parts flourish in secret? Igo's wide-angled lens captures predictable historical set pieces like Social Security Numbers and the Supreme Court's identification of "marital right to privacy" established in Griswold v. Connecticut in the same shot as lesser-known episodes: debates among social scientists around the rights of research subjects and the obligations of researchers to disclose their intentions; the protests of conservative parents who, in the 1950s, rejected psychological testing in schools; the ethos of exposure fueling memoirists, reality TV, and internet influencers.

Unlike other terms such as race, gender, or rights, "privacy" has yet to receive full treatment as a central analytic in American history. In Igo's rendering, privacy is more than a juridical construction. Rather, it is a powerful way of speaking about one's self in relation to society. What Igo calls "privacy talk" can be best understood not as a set of discrete claims, but rather a sensibility and "an index to changing ideas about society itself" (p. 8). Privacy talk served as a proxy for Americans' faith in the state, corporations, the police, technology, and all manner of credentialed, bureaucratized expertise. From the late nineteenth century through the twenty-first, the contours of privacy talk have run in parallel with some...