Seek and Hide by Amy Gajda

I studied the right to privacy a teeny tiny bit when I was an undergraduate, starting with cases that granted that the government did not have a right to know what happened in your bedroom, but we have come a long way from there--and the concept was much older than I even knew. The battle between an individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know has been fought for centuries. The founders demanded privacy for all the wrong press-quashing reasons. They wanted their dirty secrets kept just that--secret. I did not realize that Hamilton and Jefferson had it out in the public press of their time, and that Jefferson's relationship with his wife's sister, the slave Sally Hemmings, was known in his time. The Supreme Court jus­tice Louis Brandeis famously promoted First Amend­ment freedoms but argued strongly for privacy too; and presidents from the founders through Don­ald Trump confidently hid behind privacy despite intense public interest in their lives. Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging and that's doubly dangerous. Too little privacy leaves ordinary people vulnerable to those who deal in and publish secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy and dodge accountability. This very readable account takes us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law al­lows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today's full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet has the ability to erase the right to privacy completely. Take the time to read and think about this.