Privacy must be defended – this timely book proves it

Telegraph

03-05-2025

I grew up in a polite, orderly middle-class suburb in the 1960s, where today's idea of belonging to a broader, vaguer 'community' was unheard of. Neighbourliness was confined to morning greetings and borrowing a pint of milk. What was paramount was 'minding your own business': behind your front door, your life was your own. We knew that 'an Englishman's home was his castle,' and only a search warrant could breach it. At the age of 12, however, I was sent away to boarding school and that demarcation was suddenly eliminated, without borders or appeal to justice. Sleeping in dormitories; no locks on any doors, even lavatories; prefects who acted like the Gestapo – this was a regime as totalitarian as anything imagined by George Orwell.
Privacy has remained a sensitive issue to me ever since: we would all agree that the domestic freedom of the family and the individual from the state's gaze is the root of our liberties. But it also competes with equally urgent injunctions to be open and 'transparent': a right to hide coexists with a duty to expose and live by the truth. As a journalist and biographer, an essential aspect of my job is uncovering secrets and honouring facts, whatever their source; but as a citizen, I cherish my freedom within the boundaries of my own dwelling to say what I like and do what I like with myself – to hell with what anyone else might think. This is not a neat fit.
Meanwhile we have Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts that contradict each other in proposing a right to know and a right not to be known. Exchanges leaked from WhatsApp group chats incriminate and embarrass politicians. CCTV, mobile phones and computerised algorithms track our actions and movements in minute detail, holding them up to judgment. Anyone with a reputation is hostage to thought police: Boris and Carrie Johnson have a screaming row in their flat and the world gloats and sneers after neighbours turn nosey parkers (or whistleblowers); Philip Larkin is 'cancelled' for self-mocking satirical jests made in letters to Kingsley Amis that flout the modern shibboleths of racism and sexism. A militant puritanism increasingly holds us to public account for our private opinions.
This new book by cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins boldly surveys this foggy and contested territory. She isn't the first to do so – intellectual heavyweights such as Jürgen Habermas and Philippe Ariès have preceded her, but her style and approach is lighter in manner than theirs. Her research is unimpeachable nonetheless. Lucid and elegant in style, Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable – Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing.
The focus of the book is largely British, with later chapters embracing American material, moving in strict chronology and sometimes sounding like a whistlestop A-level history course as it passes from curbs on ancient Athenian democracy through to the Online Safety Act of 2023. Mysteriously, however, the hotly debated topics of tabloid intrusion into the Royal family and the shenanigans of show-business celebrities – often considered fair game, inasmuch as they feed the same publicity machine that they complain about – are barely mentioned. The Sussexes for instance, appear only as a perfunctory starting point; the hoo-ha over the tabloids' phone-tapping doesn't feature at all. Did Jenkins fear legal redress?
It was during the Reformation that the debates began to intensify, as the idea of personal conscience consolidated theologically. 'I do not seek a window into men's souls' insisted Elizabeth I, a policy developed into law by Edward Coke and seeding a code of measures culminating in the Toleration Act of 1689. Come the Victorian obsession with 'the inviolable sanctity of the household hearth' and this became almost a fetish, extending into privately addressed correspondence. Jenkins provides a particularly fascinating account of the controversy surrounding the Home Office's clandestine opening of letters to and from the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini.
A turning point in the modern concept of privacy was an article published in 1890 by the American jurists Samuel D Warren and Louis D Brandeis, aimed at filling a gap in the Constitution by asserting that those without a public role had 'a right to be left alone', embracing a further right 'to control how their thoughts, sentiments and emotions were published'. This would offer the protection of anonymity for the subjects of numerous sociological surveys that ensued in the 20th century, starting with Robert and Helen Lynd's groundbreaking study, Middletown – a 'peep through the keyhole' at life in American towns – and Alfred Kinsey's sensational reports into national sexual behaviour.
In the 1960s, the tables turned. Privacy became associated with hypocrisy, as the revolutionary young took to a rollercoaster of liberation and argued that we should come out of our closets and let it all hang out, with psychiatry endorsing the view that one's personal life should be completely open and released from repressive influence. At the same time, there was an often paranoid fascination with the technology of bugging and wiretapping, dramatised in a rush of spy movies and culminating in the Watergate scandal. Related anxieties about government harvesting and hoarding information about individuals on computers can be traced back to the American proposal for a National Data Base in the mid 1960s and surfaced again in Cambridge Analytica's dubious role in the American election of 2016.
But what has probably eroded privacy more than anything else is the explosion in popularity of fly-on-the-wall 'reality' television, a phenomenon that was born in 1973 with An American Family, a PBS show observing the Louds of Santa Barbara from within their own home – a concept immediately imitated by the BBC with The Family and the Wilkinses of Reading.
These showed only highlights of what was recorded: a development that followed 22 years later was Jennifer Ringley's live and unedited streaming of everything in her life, including sexual activity, on a webcam. This would inspire Endemol to produce Big Brother and all its lamentably voyeuristic spin-offs dedicated to making what was private public.
A lot here gives one pause for thought, if not unease, and Jenkins is justifiably of the view that 'the private realm is now under assault' from both 'indifference' and 'a growing suspicion of privacy itself'. For evidence of the latter one has only to look at measures approved over the last decade by the SNP-dominated Scottish parliament. The Named Persons Act, struck down by the Supreme Court in 2019, 'safeguarded' the welfare of every child by granting them access to an individual whose authority would effectively override that of their parents. In 2021 the Hate Crime and Public Order Act criminalised hate speech within one's own home, theoretically making chance remarks at a dinner party or in the course of a marital argument, subject to as much as seven years' imprisonment. In its most outspoken passages, Tiffany Jenkins's book is a potent defence against such legislation and a valuable call to defend privacy as something more than what one cynical journalist described as 'the space bad people need to do bad things in'.