What Do You Have to Hide?

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Lowry Pressly.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is the author of The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, which was named by The New Yorker as one of the best new books of 2024. I invited Lowry to join me in Austin, and we sat down to have a conversation about data, surveillance, and the role of privacy in a flourishing human life. Below are highlights from our conversation. For the full dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page. A CONVERSATION WITH LOWRY PRESSLYJared: When most people think about privacy, it’s purely in terms of apps and websites and tech companies. We even have this nomenclature of privacy settings—how private a person you are is almost measurable by how many of those features you turn on. Is that too narrow an understanding?Lowry: Without a doubt. The idea of privacy as something important to human beings as such doesn’t emerge in the public consciousness until the middle of the nineteenth century, as a reaction primarily to the photograph camera and the first mass media. The danger today is thinking of privacy through the lens of privacy settings. One, it gives us the wrong idea of what privacy is—deciding the audiences for your information is better described as confidentiality or secrecy. Two, and this is the dangerous one: the camera and the newspaper weren’t part of an economic system whose profit motive was tied to the diminution of privacy. When we use the technologies of the data economy to think about privacy, we take for granted that what Mark Zuckerberg calls privacy settings track the reality of what privacy is—and not the reality of his business model.“Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device.”Jared: So let’s go back to the camera. Did we invent privacy as a right in response to it, or did it just make salient something we’d ignored?Lowry: A bit of yes and a bit of no. The word goes back to the 1500s—the privy council, private correspondence. But it isn’t used to describe an interest human beings have just by virtue of being human until the mid-nineteenth century. The big moral panic has to do with cameras: 1888 was George Eastman’s Kodak, which made candid shots possible for the first time. And note the language of candid—it normally means freely expressing oneself, and now we naturally use it for photographs.One of the first legal cases to try to vindicate a right to privacy was a woman whose picture was taken on stage by a paying member of the audience. The judge said this was a moral violation of privacy—sadly, we have no law to cover it. That’s later taken up in the famous 1890 Warren and Brandeis article. What worried people weren’t illicit exposures but candid ones—taking a moment out of the flux and flow of life as it’s lived and fixing it in a permanent form. There’s a continuum—being looked at, the person taking notes about you, the photograph. The question is, what moves us along it?Jared: Here’s a case I don’t have strong feelings about. Imagine I’m eating lunch in a park and discover someone at the next bench has been making a charcoal drawing of me. I don’t have as strong an aversion to that. The person sketching is providing an interpretation of your presence rather than just grabbing the moment. Whereas the more factual it becomes—12:01, took a bite; 12:02, picked his nose—the worse it feels.Lowry: The charcoal drawing says at least as much about the artist as about you. The list isn’t interpretive. And that goes to what really bothered people about the camera. It creates an image that seems to bypass human interpretation—people called it the mirror of nature, nature’s pencil. It makes a claim to objectivity. And there was a belief, which we still have, that a person’s image—particularly the face—expresses what this person is really like. What the camera seemed to do was t