Chinese Concepts of Privacy Workshop

Briefing paper: concepts of privacy in English
(revised draft, 15 February 2001)

Not to be cited or quoted without permission

Bonnie S. McDougall 30 January 2001

This paper presents a brief survey of concepts of privacy in English-speaking countries. It is not concerned with instances of behaviour that fall within broad definitions of privacy; its purpose is to explore concepts of privacy in discourse. For reasons to be explained below, it focusses on works written in or translated into English; given the dominance of the U.S. in world culture, they are to a large extent representative of Western concepts of privacy in general. It does not offer a definition of privacy, since there is none that is commonly accepted in the literature on the subject. Many of the works cited below produce their own definitions, and it has been claimed that discourse on the subject does not require strict definition.¹ In the late 20th century, as rights to privacy have come under threat through technological and political change, privacy has come to acquire new meanings, functions and values. Modern privacy studies in English generally distinguish between three aspects (a) a sense of privacy, as experienced by people from different countries, times and backgrounds; (b) concepts of privacy, as part of a national or personal discourse; and (c) rights of privacy in law.

The English words "private" and "privacy" come from the Latin privatus, meaning "withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself", and the generally negative sense is continued into the early understanding of the English word "private" (whose first recorded appearance goes back to 1450). ² By the end of the 19th century, "privacy" had become related to legal and political rights, associated with modernity and advanced civilisation, and attributed relatively or very high value. ³ Near-synonyms for "private" as a descriptor in English in different contexts include "individual", "personal", "familiar", "family", "domestic", "secret", "confidential", "secure","inner", "interior" and "intimate". According to Magnusson, an Elizabethan equivalent term for privacy avant la lettre is "contemplation". ⁴

Many European languages do not have exact equivalents of the terms "private" and "privacy". In Dutch, for example, the words "eigen"[cognate with "own"] and "openbaar" [cognate with "open"] are used with reference to property or access where English would use "private" and "public". Swedish has a close equivalent for private ("privat") but not for privacy. The Finnish words related to privacy, such as "yksitisasia" [private or intimate affairs], "yksityinen" [private as opposed to public] and "yksityisyydensuoja" [private data protection] are derived from the word "yksi" meaning "one" or "single." ⁵ Differences in denotation or connotation do not invalidate the argument that concepts of privacy exist in equivalent ways among different language groups. Few English-speakers would wish to claim on linguistic grounds that concepts of privacy in the Netherlands, Sweden or Finland are radically different. ⁶ If, as argued by Steven Pinker, mental life goes on independently of particular languages, ⁷ concepts of privacy can exist equally in cultures despite lexical differences. As Charles Taylor puts it in a different context, it is an error to suppose that in cross-cultural comparisons the language of understanding (or sympathy) has to be either ours, theirs or a supposedly "neutral" or scientific language; it should rather be a "language of perspicuous contrast". ⁸ "Such a language of contrast might show their language of understanding to be distorted or inadequate in some respects, or it might show ours to be so (in which case, we might find that understanding them leads to an alteration of our self-understanding, and hence our form of life—a far from unknown process in history); or it might show both to be so." ⁹ For practical reasons, the discussion below is by and large limited to the discussion of privacy in English.

One of the most original and influential theorists about the ancient world, Mikhail Bakhtin, locates privacy and a sense of self solely in terms of Western civilisation in his discussion of narrative forms that introduce private lives into fiction. ¹⁰ Starting with the Greek romance, he notes that in contrast with all other genres of ancient literature, "it represents people entirely as individuals and as 'private persons'... This image of a person 'corresponds to the abstract-alien world of the Greek romance: in such a world, a person can only function as an isolated and private individual, deprived or any organic connection' ... with his native land, his social network, or even his family. 'He is a solitary person, lost in an alien world... He has no mission; he lives in 'privacy and isolation'... But profound ways of describing interiority do not accompany this focus on privacy...'the ancient world did not succeed in generating forms and unities that were adequate to the private individual and his life..' Thus, a curious contradiction shapes the image of a person in the Greek romance. On the one hand, people are private, isolated individuals; all public events have meaning 'only insofar as they relate to private fates'... On the other hand, the depiction of private life takes place in highly rhetorical and juridicial forms of public accounting (as opposed, let us say, to intimate confession). That, indeed, is one reason why legal procedures often play so important a role in these novels." ¹¹

Forms for depictions of private life only emerge with the chronotope of the Greek adventure of everyday life, e.g. The Golden Ass. "Bakhtin stresses that the very concept of a private daily realm was itself a relatively late discovery in ancient literature and its concept of a person. The modern perspective, in which distinct (if related) public and private spheres exist, is not a universal. ... The everyday life that Lucius observes while an ass 'is an exclusively personal and private life' ... And what this essential private meant is that new technical problems had to be solved for portraying it.... The technical problem is simultaneously a conceptual one... How does one know—from what perspective does one describe—what goes on in intimate spheres?... The first significant steps toward resolving this contradiction take place in the adventure novel of everyday life... One possible solution... was the criminal trial, in which eyewitness accounts, documents, confessions and analogous devices could subsequently make public acts that had been committed under the presumption of concealment or privacy.... Lucius's transformation affords him the special perspective needed to observe intimate actions, because human privacy is not compromised by the presence of an ass.... 'the literature of private lives is essentially a literature of snooping about, of overhearing how others live'... In a sense... it would seem to follow that the position of the reader in such cases becomes that of a voyeur." Servants, prostitutes, parvenues, rogues and tramps can all serve as the anonymous third person in private life. ¹²

New forms based on changing views of the self, from public-only identities to "aspects that might be intimately personal, unrepeatedly individual, charged with self" arose in Hellenic and Roman times, according to Bakhtin, as in Cicero's lettters to Atticus. "Though still highly conventionalised, and still saturated with exteriority, the familiar letter nevertheless provided a vehicle for exploring 'the private sense of self' in 'an intimate and familiar atmosphere'." ¹³ The same holds for other kinds of writing such as biographies, autobiographies, confessions; nevertheless, "Selfhood, though it encompasses the private sphere, is still basically roooted in the public." ¹⁴

The technical devices noted above provide witness to private acts but only the exterior of the private persons. "The deeper issue involved in the problem of the 'third person' is, of course, how are we to understand the complex world of the 'internal man'..., that is, the world of individual and subjective experience." ¹⁵ "To begin with... the novelist himself assumed the position of the fool, clown, or rogue" [i.e. the third man]. ¹⁶ The emergence of a genuine sense of "becoming", in which individuals must genuinely grow, took place in the time of Goethe. ¹⁷ In this respect, Bakhtin's outlook is historicist in the sense mentioned above.

Bakhtin's work, which did not become widely influential until the 1980s, is not often quoted in studies on privacy, even in such comprehensive works as Histoire de la vie privée, a five-volume study edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, first published in French in 1985 and translated as A History of Private Life in 1987. The editors start their investigations in pagan Rome and limit their geographical coverage of the ancient world to Byzantium in the 10th and 11th centuries. Apart from brief discussions on the nature of privacy in the two introductions, anecdote is favoured over theory by the contributors to this study.

Norbert Elias did not take privacy as his subject but his comments on shame, embarrassment, delicacy and modesty are frequently quoted by writers on privacy. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilisation (originally published as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation in 1939), examines the process by which a code of polite manners was formulated and disseminated between the 16th and 18th centuries in Europe, starting with the publication of De civilitate morum puerilium [On civility in children] by Erasmus in 1530. ¹⁸ Erasmus dealt with the changing etiquette of familiar and social life, ranging from snot (how to handle a handkerchief before and after blowing one's nose) to urination (someone inadvertently seen urinating should not be greeted). ¹⁹ "By his treatise, Erasmus gave new sharpness and impetus to the long-established and commonplace word civilitas And corresponding words were developed in the various popular languages: the French civilité, the English "civility"" ²⁰ Elias does not assume that civilisation is unique to Europe; commenting on how meat is served and eaten, he notes that "the concealment of carving behind the scenes was effected much earlier and more radically [in ancient China] than in the West." ²¹

Hannah Arendt is one of the earliest writers on privacy to note the blurring of the public and private realms after Roman times with the rise of social life, and the increasing "manifoldness and variety" of the private realm in the modern age. ²² According to Arendt, privacy guarantees pyschological and social depth, containing things which cannot withstand the constant presence of others on the public scene; it undergirds the public by establishing boundaries, which fix identity; and it preserves the sacred and mysterious spaces of life. Some phenomena are different if they are not private: confessions of shame or guilt made public become boastful; over-disclosure becomes false, rehearsed; terror, a guilty secret; love and goodness are destroyed. ²³ On the other hand, "to live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life", so that to realise his full human potential and prevent catastrophe for mankind it is necessary for man to engage actively in public life. ²⁴

Following Arendt, ²⁵ Habermas systematised and developed her concept of social and public life since Greek and Roman times in Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (1962), which became the chief source for discussion of public and private realms from the 1960s on (the English translation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, appeared strategically in 1989). As suggested by his title, Habermas was primarily interested in the public realm but paradoxically found its vitality dependent "on an organisation of private life that enables and encourages citizens to rise above private identities and concerns." ²⁶ Drawing on literary evidence as well as philosophers and political writers, Habermas focussed on the development of the modern European polity, with virtually no attention to non-European thought or practice. His distinction between mutually interpenetrating public and private spheres within a general private realm (i.e. as opposed to the state) has led to considerable confusion, but his main thesis, that modern society has undergone a transformation in which the expansion of the public sphere within the private realm has taken place at the expense of the private sphere, ²⁷ became a dominant theme in Western culture in the late 1960s and 1970s. One manifestion of its currency is the novel The History Man (1975) by Malcolm Bradbury, whose protagonist Howard Kirk is writing a sociological treatise called The Defeat of Privacy. Throughout the novel, Kirk repeatedly attacks the notion of privacy as outmoded while in the last resort guarding his own privacy in his writing and sexual life. A hugely successful satire on academic sociology in contemporary Britain, The History Man was repeatedly re-issued throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The academic sociologists and social psychologists who take part in one key scene in The History Man, a departmental meeting, are described by the author as "sophisticates of meetings, readers of Goffman". ²⁸ Erving Goffman has been contrasted with Habermas in laying stress on the private or backstage aspects of the public and private realms. ²⁹ Although Goffman restricts himself in works such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to discussing "Anglo-American" behaviour, his analysis of the psychological functions of privacy are applicable to a wider area and will be quoted again below.

George Steiner refers to privacy only in passing, but one of his comments is frequently cited in arguments that privacy is primarily a value unique to modern, bourgeois Western society. The passage in question occurs in his 1965 essay "Literature and Post-History": "Our present concept of literary form is, in several respects, related to privacy. The practice of reading a book to oneself, in silence, is a specific, late historical development. It implies a number of economic and social pre-conditions: a room of one's one (Virginia Woolf's significant phrase) or, at least, a home spacious enought to allow areas of quiet; the private possession of books; means of artificial light during the evening hours. What is implicit is the style of life of the bourgeoisie in an industrial, largely urban complex of values and privileges. That complex crystallized later than is often supposed What is less generally understood is how much of literature—and how much of modern literature—was not conceived to be read in private silence. The man who reads alone in a room with his mouth closed, from a volume which he owns, is a special product of western bourgeois literacy and leisure." ³⁰ In the same collection of essays from the late 1950s to the middle 1960s, Steiner relates "the rise and primacy of the novel" and "the domestic privacy, leisure and reading habits which it required from its audience" to "the great age of the industrial, mercantile bourgeoise"; ³¹ and in the same vein, "the dreams and nightmares of the mercantile ethic, of middle-class privacy, and of the monetary-sexual conflicts and delights of industrial society have their monument [in the novel]." ³² Steiner claims that "The world-image codified by typography made of western man a unit at once impersonal and private, unique and repeatable" ³³ and laments the erosion of privacy in modern life. ³⁴ It is difficult to reconcile this kind of blinkered nonsense to Steiner's respect for other cultures, for instance, in his defence of comparative literature. ³⁵ A more finely-nuanced version of the same argument was put forward more recently in Cecile M. Jagodzinski's Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England; Jagodzinksi restricts her discussion to the emergence of the concept of privacy as a personal right but even so is still on shaky ground. ³⁶

The principle of a right of privacy was traced back to ancient Jewish law in Samuel H. Hofstadter and George Horowitz's influential The Right of Privacy in 1964. ³⁷ Hofstader, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Horowitz, a law professor, also cited case law from several European and Commonwealth countries to show the great range of codified legal rights (or their absence) current at the beginning of the 1960s. This state of affairs gradually changed after the General Assembly of the United Nations "took cognizance" of the rights of privacy as formulated in Article 17 of the International Covenants on Human Rights in 1960. The text of Article 17 declared that (1) No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour or reputation; and (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. ³⁸ Most works on privacy written after 1960 referred at least in passing to privacy as a universal human right, despite different legal systems. For practical reasons, however, discussions on legal aspects of privacy, as in Ruth Gavison's often-quoted study in The Yale Law Journal in 1980, tend to be country-specific. ³⁹

Alan F. Westin's Privacy and Freedom (1967) is one of the first postwar works specifically on the theme of privacy, and his delineation of four basic states of individual privacy (anonymity, reserve, solitude and intimacy) is widely quoted by later writers. ⁴⁰ Professor of Public Law and Government at Columbia University, Westin is concerned about new technologies in the hands of government and commercial agencies for invading privacy, and puts forward proposals for changes in U.S. law for greater protection to the ordinary citizen. Westin, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on "Privacy in Western History: From the Age of Pericles to the American Republic", ⁴¹ is impatient with the notion that privacy is a particularist value that emerged in the late 18th century, and points out that the tradition of limiting the surveillance powers of the authorities over the private activities of individuals and groups goes back to ancient Greece. ⁴² At the same time, he points out that "the individual's desire for privacy is never absolute, since participation in society is an equally powerful desire:" ⁴³ Each of the four states mentioned above is qualitative and relative to culture: ⁴⁴ even animals seek periods of individual seclusion or small-group intimacy. ⁴⁵ Mead's famous proclamation that among Samoans, "there is no privacy and no sense of shame little is mysterious, little forbidden" is shown to be based on a restrictive understanding of the varied mechanisms of privacy, where speaking softly is as valid as mechanism as physical avoidance. ⁴⁶ The functions of privacy are grouped under another four headings: personal autonomy, emotional release, self-evaluation, and limited and protected communication. ⁴⁷ Westin also grants organisations rights of privacy, including medical and business confidentiality, jury deliberations, executive privilege and the secrets of the confessional. ⁴⁸

Westin drew on a substantial body of work from anthropologists, sociologists and jurists. According to the most prominent researcher on philosophical aspects of privacy, Ferdinand Schoeman, there was no major philosophical discussion on the value of privacy until the late 1960s. ⁴⁹ By 1968, another philosopher, Charles Fried, noted that the literature on privacy was "enormous". ⁵⁰ Starting from this time, studies on privacy from all disciplines and covering all aspects of the subject grew into an overwhelming mass, from which the works mentioned below are only a small sample.

Writing in 1977, Carl D. Schneider related the sense of privacy to the sense of shame. ⁵¹ Privacy allows freedom from the distraction of shame or pride; privacy fosters growth; "every profound spirit needs a mask" (Nietszche). Privacy and shame have psychological and religious uses; shame is needed in social and personal ethics. Shame protects the private sphere from exposure; restore our sense of shame and we become a better person in a better society. Shame is the basis of humanity, according to evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Havelock Ellis; the repeated expression of both advocacy of freedom from shame and the need for a sense of shame can be found in Nietzsche's work. ⁵² According to Schneider, the private world is both a realm that is valued for oneself as a retreat, and one of which we are suspicious in other people, as of lesser value than public world. It is essential as safey valve; it lessens personal tension and makes social relations endurable; it allows backstage areas and remissive spaces in which it is possible to abandon roles. ⁵³ Totalitarian régimes are opposed to respect for persons, and thus deny privacy; when society does not provide for privacy, being apart can only take the form of hiding. ⁵⁴

Quoting Malinowsky and Goffman, Schneider lists phenomena where privacy is related to dignity: the use of nicknames or formal names; the names of relatives (note the difficulty in calling one's mother-in-law "mother"); things that carry the weight of the individual's identity or autonomy; faces and other body parts; things needed to care for the body such as soap, towels and combs. ⁵⁵ The open display of bodily functions (defecating, great pain, the process of dying) threatens dignity, revealing an individual vulnerable to being reduced to his bodily existence; the function of shame is to preserve wholeness and integrity. ⁵⁶ Bodily functions (sexual activities, sleep and excretion; illness, suffering and eating) are rarely physiological processes alone. We invest all our activities with meanings, so that the physiological is invariably permeated with the human; the obscene is a deliberate violation of the sense of shame and privacy. ⁵⁷ All social interaction involves risk to the self; the problem of shame and the private realm is the problem of human vulnerability. Human relationships demand both a protecting of and risking of this vulnerability through a pattern of mutual and measured self-disclosure. ⁵⁸ Schneider very specifically sees privacy as a universal human need, not just a phenomenon of 18-20th century Western civilisation.

Anthropological interest in the existence of universal traits in human behaviour peaked in the early 1980s, when claims on cultural differences by Mead and others that formed the conventional assumptions for research methodology from the 1920s onwards were undermined by new research in the late 1960s and 1970s that showed the differences had been exaggerated and similarities had largely been ignored; new research in linguistics and in brain-mapping gave added support. A summary of this debate and of current thinking on traits which can be categorised as universal are contained in Donald L. Brown's Human Universals (1991). ⁵⁹ Among the characteristics of so-called "Universal People" (UP) are gossip, lying, poetical and rhetorical speech forms, narrative and story telling, kinship categories, standards of sexual modesty, sex generally in private, and discreetness in elimination of body wastes. ⁶⁰ Of particular relevance to this study is Brown's description of the UP's concept of the person: "They distinguish self from others, and they can see the self both as subject and object They know that people have a private inner life, have memories, make plans, choose between alternatives, and otherwise make decisions (not without ambivalent feeling sometimes). The UP are spontaneously and intuitively able to get into the minds of others to imagine how they are thinking and feeling." ⁶¹ In his annotated bibliography, Brown cites earlier lists of universals from 1945, only some of which specifically include privacy; for example, a partial list of universals drawn up in 1945 included "modesty concerning natural functions" but not privacy per se. ⁶²

The anthropologists' debate on universals entered general intellectual discourse in the 1980s and 1990s and became part of the background to discussions on privacy. Neverthless even a philosopher as sensitive to ethnocentricity as Charles Taylor in 1981 and again in 1985 identifies a sense of privacy as a defining characteristic of a specifically modern Western concept of self-identity. ⁶³ In premodern societies, according to Taylor, "One's life was led before everyone else, and hence shame and its avoidance played a big role in people's lives. There was no space, not just physically but psycho-socially, to withdraw into the privacy of one's own self-estimate, or the opinions of a circle based on affinity." "With the rise of the modern identity, this intensely public life withers. The community retreats, and the nuclear family achieves privacy." ⁶⁴ In modern societies, privacy is a space for family affection and individual fulfillment: "the good life requires privacy, that one's life no longer be mediated by the larger group and the pattern that it embodies, for each finds his nature in himself." ⁶⁵ Studies of rights to privacy in law also accepted nation-states as imposing significant boundaries: although to some extent common law in England corresponds to common law in the United States, the different legal systems of Scotland and continental Europe, not to mention other parts of the world, appear to be too remote for realistic comparison. Nevertheless, the methodology employed by Ruth Gavison in 1980 utilises a framework distinguishing status (privacy as a situation of an individual vis-à-vis others, rather than a claim, a psychological state or a form of control) and characteristics (related to secrecy, anonymity and solitude) to establish what she calls "a neutral concept of privacy" that can in practice be used for cross-cultural comparison. ⁶⁶

The Private Me (1980), by June Nobel and William Nobel, anticipates the obsession with "me" that is said to characterise the 1980s. In this work, privacy is seen as a need in personal pyschological development, self-awareness and identity. It is a crusading work, seeing privacy under threat from intrusions by family, government and society, and offering advice on ways to foster privacy through developmental programmes including encounter groups and other forms of self-taught or group therapy. Among examples of modern devaluations in privacy, Nobel and Nobel note that until recently, diaries, letters and biographies were regarded as private legacy bequeathed by the deceased to family, and chart the growth of straight autobiography as distinct from the novel as fictionalised autobiography. ⁶⁷ They deplore compulsive self-disclosure (glamorised as candour) and over-disclosure, not only because it becomes boring but because it looks for sympathy as against creating intimacy or developing self-awareness. ⁶⁸ Reticence, on the other hand, encourages limited or protected communication, while privacy keeps emotions and acts from being trivialised: what is important is kept private (e.g. lovemaking). ⁶⁹ Quoting Westin on the four basic states of individual privacy, they emphasise the link between privacy and power: privacy allows or asserts power, and power confers privacy. ⁷⁰ Privacy in modern America has become a luxury, indicating status, ⁷¹ whereas it should be seen as a necessity for creativity especially by professionals. ⁷² Lack of privacy (e.g. among the poor, and in corporate interference in employees' lives), leads to stress, and lack of assertiveness means that important boundaries cannot be established. ⁷³ Intimacy means sharing privacy in non-trivial ways; privacy does not mean being alone. ⁷⁴ Privacy is resisted by calling it "selfishness"; shyness in modern America is regarded as synonymous with worthlessness but can be seen instead as sensitivity and perceptiveness. ⁷⁵ Children develop a sense of privacy from the age of 8 years on and need privacy to develop fulfilling sex lives. ⁷⁶ To Nobel and Nobel, a sense of privacy is basic to life and enjoyment of privacy occupies a high place in the hierarchy of values. A similar work which followed a few years later is Sissela Bok's Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. Bok is more careful in delineating aspects of life where secrecy and privacy can be undesirable, but on the whole upholds both as deserving protection in law. ⁷⁷

Barrington Moore's Privacy (1984), which like Westin's Privacy and Freedom is frequently quoted, examines four types of societies: primitive societies, classical Athens, Hebrew society as revealed in the Old Testament, and ancient China. Restricted by his narrow definition of privacy (although he gives Arendt and Westin as well as Habermas as background sources), Moore finds that there are some societies where there was very nearly nothing that corresponded to "our conception of privacy". ⁷⁸ Moore raises naive questions about privacy in primitive societies and answers them idiosyncratically. ⁷⁹ He is as interested in what constitutes the public realm as the private, and much of the discussion about ancient Greece and China relates to the mutual obligations of government and the populace at large. Moore notes the Confucian distinction between the separate realms of the state (public) and the family (private) ⁸⁰ as well as information in early texts on courtship, the family and friendship. ⁸¹ Among his conclusions, Moore maintains that privacy of communication "becomes possible only in a literate, complex society with strong liberal traditions—in other worlds, a quite modern society," ⁸² and that "without democracy private rights are either stunted or absent. In comparison with fourth-century [B.C.] Athensprivate rights were very weakamong the Chinese of ancient recorded history." ⁸³ Remarks such as the latter, taken out of context, may have been partly responsible for the widespread belief that the Chinese have little or no sense of privacy. Although Moore is well-informed about ancient China, the rationale of his book is to produce generalisations from a limited range of sources rather than to seek precise meanings or nuances within Chinese historical development.

Anthropology and history both provide copious instances of privacy contents and functions, but privacy regarded as a concept or value falls to the philosophers. In his 1984 summary of the literature on privacy, Schoeman distinguishes between privacy as a moral value in individual lives and privacy as a means towards the preservation of human relationships. ⁸⁴ Writing some years later for the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy, he focusses in Privacy and Social Freedom (1992) on the dimensions of privacy in social (rather than governmental or corporate) encounters, where privacy protects the individual from social overreaching and promotes social freedom. Schoeman distinguishes between expressive and functional roles of privacy, noting for instance than at some times and places people might be more (or less) embarrassed at being observed defecating than by having one's diary read by others. ⁸⁵ Like Moore, he makes some reference to non-Western practice, but his teleologically constructed account of how privacy evolved as a contemporary issue is strictly linear and progressive. On the other hand, his formula for identifying the relationships involving privacy is sufficiently precise and abstract to be used for the exploration of privacy in non-Western societies.

Another philosopher, Julie Inness, takes her data from cases under United States tort and constitutional law and specifically limits her findings to the United States only, but the framework she uses in Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation (1993) is more systematic than in any of the studies mentioned above and is readily adaptable to other countries and disciplines. Whereas Westin and later writers give an account of the functions as well as the the content (or instances) of privacy, their discussions of values tends to be perfunctory, and they overlook the category of mechanisms. Schoeman and Inness are also the only writers in this review who draw attention to feminist perspectives on privacy, noting that protection of privacy may function as a social control mechanism to maintain the dominance of groups or individuals in power and enforce silence and helplessness on others. ⁸⁶

Gini Graham Scott's Mind Your Own Business: The Battle for Personal Privacy (1995), as the title indicates, is a populist and crusading work like The Private Me. Like the latter, it also tends to be parochial: although Chapter 2 refers to anthropological studies of early societies and the history of Western civilisation, the statistics mentioned in Chapter 1 and the cases of the rest of the book assume that the United States constitutes the world, and Scott accepts Moore's assertion that privacy was not a strong need in early societies. Scott sets out four functions of privacy in contemporary Western society and five major areas where the battle for privacy is taking place. ⁸⁷ There are detailed accounts of privacy cases in the United States since the 1960s, relating to employment, police surveillance, media intrusion, medical and health issues, and medical and insurance records, and Scott is unequivocally opposed to court decisions which favour employers (the right to know), the media (freedom of speech), schools, the law courts and the police (safety of society). Scott's purpose is to alert people to the dangers to privacy and to grounds on which privacy may or may not be protected in law (the government may refuse to release private records to an individual on the grounds that other individuals' privacy might be infringed; people may be willing to swap lost privacy for money and fame). ⁸⁸ Convinced that the problems in safeguarding privacy have become more intense in the last few decades, Scott provides in an appendix a list of computer privacy bulletin boards, and gives his own address for further communication.

Published in 1995, the same year as Mind Your Own Business, Deckle McClean's Privacy and its Invasion gives space to opposing views: the author, a professor of journalism, sees privacy as endowed with different values at different times and places. ⁸⁹ According to McLean, the history of privacy is usually based on privacy as an issue, often embedded in other issues. ⁹⁰ It is valued more by introverts than extroverts, of whom the latter are generally more prevalent in the United States (than, for example, in England). ⁹¹ Privacy has its negative aspects ⁹² and cannot be the dominant value in any society, but the desire for privacy is universal (despite Moore's findings). ⁹³ Corresponding roughly to Scott's four functions, McClean's four types of privacy are access control (controlling personal boundaries, secrets, masks); room to grow (cultivating interior processes for understanding, enrichment, and integration of character and personality; and sharing the same with trusted others); safety-valve (for rest and recuperation from the public arena); respect for the individual (insisting that one is more than a cipher and respecting others for being more than ciphers). ⁹⁴ The relativity of privacy as a value, with particular attention to the plurality of ways in which the boundaries between public and private are defined, appears as issue in T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (1999). ⁹⁵ Acccording to his fellow philosopher, Thomas Nagel, "There is room in Scanlon's theory for a degree of relativism, in two senses. The first is what he calls 'parametric universalism', according to which the appropriate ways to show respect for certain general values such as privacy or loyalty will vary with different social conventions or traditions." ⁹⁶ The rise of communitarianism in the late 1980s brought a political dimension to reservations about the primacy of privacy rights, as discussed in Amitai Etzioni's The Limits of Privacy. ⁹⁷ Etzioni sees privacy as a highly privileged value in the U.S., a value that needs to be modified for the sake of such common interests as public safety and public health; he shows, paradoxically, that intrusions on privacy are chiefly from the private sector and that the privacy of indiviudals is best protected by granting more powers to governments.

The impact of new technologies on privacy emerged as an issue in the 1970s. In Databanks in a Free Society (1972), one of the first books linking data collection with privacy, Alan Westin and Michael A. Baker found that the scope of information collection about individuals had not yet significally expanded as a direct result of computerisation; ⁹⁸ a National Science Foundation conference in 1979 in which Westin was a key speaker found this to be no longer the case. ⁹⁹ A Harris survey in 1979 on attitudes towards privacy in the United States, directed by Alan Westin, addressed the potential abuse or misuse of personal information by business or by government. It identified "growing public concern about the perceived erosion of privacy in the early 1970s in the U.S." and showed that "The American people are greatly concerned about threats to their personal privacy. This concern is pervasive throughout society." ¹⁰⁰ One of the first book-length warnings was The Computer Invasion by Craig T. Norback, which provides "rudimentary information on most of the personal files to which an individual might desire access" ¹⁰¹ (although at 288 pages, even this "rudimentary" survey is quite substantial). David H. Flaherty, author of Privacy and Data Protection: An International Bibliography (1984) and Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies: the Federal Republic of German, Sweden, France, Canada, & the United States (1989), who admits to having been inspired by Westin to make the issue of data protection and privacy his life's work, was one of the first North American scholars to examine privacy as an international issue. His Privacy and Data Protection: An International Bibliography (1984) lists Western-language works published between 1978 and 1983 concerning Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States and the rest of the world, but more than half of the 1862 entries (books, articles and government reports) refer solely to the U.S., and China does not rate a single entry. ¹⁰² The Data Protection Act: a practical guide (1984), by Richard Sizer and Philip Newman, opens with a discussion of privacy and English common law, but British Data Protection Act of 1984 does not mention privacy as an issue, and privacy is not a legal right under English law. The difficulty of legal definitions of privacy in this context is raised in a widely-quoted article by Ruth Gavison, "Privacy and the Limits of the Law" (1980). ¹⁰³ H. Jeff Smith's Managing Privacy: Information Technology and Corporate America (1994) concentrates on the threat to information privacy by corporate computer databases in industries such as insurance, banking and direct marketing; among his findings is the sensitivity of the topic in many industries, as firms admitted in their refusal to take part in his study. ¹⁰⁴ The topic also became a preoccupation among sociologists such as William G. Staples, whose The Culture of Surveillance was published in 1997. According to Staples, impersonal and pervasive social control by intrusion on body and other physical space by modern technological devices is justified by rationality, humaneness, and the lack of personal surveillance in an post-industrial society. It is part of the post-modern condition that the intrusion comes in the form of many small acts by different agencies, ordinary citizens and family members as well as by corporate and state agencies, so that it can be resisted (in his view) only by small acts of resistance and pressure on corporate and state agencies. The Electronic Privacy Papers (1998?), by Bruce Schneier and David Baniser, gives more detail on the kinds of electronic surveillance are now available; ¹⁰⁵ like The Culture of Surveillance, it is based on United States conditions but is broadly applicable to all developed and developing countries. Changes in privacy law and the advocacy of privacy as a human right are also associated with the surveillance and data-collecting technology. ¹⁰⁶ Newspapers, which themselves are deeply involved in privacy issues, continue to keep the debate in the public domain. ¹⁰⁷

The issue of celebrity privacy goes back at least to the 19th century growth of newspapers but came to dominate discourse on privacy at the end of the 20th century. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 was regarded by many as due in part to media intrusion, enabled by the use of new surveillance equipment, and also in part by press refusal to observe conventions on personal privacy for public figures. Clinton's impeachment in 1999 for having denied on oath improper sexual relationships became unavoidable when DNA analysis was carried out on his semen. Responding to the constitutional crisis that then arose, Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, made a plea in The Times Literary Supplement on 14 August 1998 for the protection of presidential privacy. ¹⁰⁸ In what he called "the disastrous erosion of the precious but fragile conventions of personal privacy in the United States over the last ten or twenty years", Nagel claimed that "American society has lost its grip on a fundamental value, one which cannot be enforced by law alone but without which civilization would not survive... The division of the self protects the limited public space from unmanageable encroachment and the unruly inner life from excessive inhibition... The growth of tolerance does not make the collapse of privacy significantly less damaging." In a follow-up in November 1998, it was claimed that Nagel's plea was instrumental in the formulation of Clinton's appeal a few days later that "Even Presidents have private lives." ¹⁰⁹ The consistent support enjoyed by the Democratic Party in the elections that followed and by the then president throughout the impeachment hearings in the spring of 1999 suggest that the United States electorate sympathised with Clinton's plea. With worldwide publicity in the news media for debates on privacy in relation to these events, even countries with relatively closed societies were affected.

Although the wide range of ideas on privacy described above is by no means exhaustive, it gives some sense of the broad picture in contemporary Western concepts of privacy. On the whole, in works written in the 1990s, the universalist school of thought is dominant and privacy is given a high relative value, with limited attention given to its negative aspects.Writers on privacy do not draw rigid dichotomies between private and public spheres, nor give a great deal of attention to the triangulation of private, public and civil spheres; ¹¹⁰ writers on public spheres and civil society in the late 20th century sense, on the other hand, are more interested in the tension between civil and public spheres than between civil and private or public and private.

The most useful methodology for cross-cultural comparison emerging from this survey comes from Inness's Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation. Although in popular discourse, and especially in cross-cultural comparisons, privacy is most often seen in terms of instances of conduct, these specific instances, mostly taken out of context, tell us little about how privacy is conceptualised. A more promising approach, following Inness, is by examining the functions, mechanisms and values as well as the content (instances) of privacy in a given context. Another popular assumption is that concepts of privacy (or privacy behaviour) are rooted in national cultures, often in the form of a single overriding concept. The evidence in the materials cited above, along with my preliminary studies on Chinese concepts of privacy, indicates that this is not the case. In China, for example, there appears to be no single, overriding concept of privacy but a wide range of concepts on privacy, none of which is unique to China. It is the purpose of this workshop to investigate more intensively than has previously been done the range and variety of Chinese concepts of privacy.

¹ Schoeman notes that there may be some benefit in not striving for verbal precision in such a volatile and controversial area; see Privacy and social freedom, p. 11; Inness, on the other hand, believes that a correct definition of privacy and the true nature of its function and value is both necessary and possible; see Inness, Privacy, Intimacy and Isolation, p. 5. In her doctoral dissertation on privacy, submitted in 1983, Katherine Day devotes her first chapter to definitions of privacy and gives more than two hundred examples in an appendix; see Katherine J. Day, "Perspectives on Privacy: a Sociological Analysis", University of Edinburgh, 1985, pp. 1-21 and 288-338a. ^

² Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 12, pp. 515-19. ^

³ The 1890 declaration by Judges Warren and Brandeis on rights to privacy under U.S. law is frequently taken as a turning point in the development of modern concepts of privacy. On the normative function of "privacy" and its distinction from the adjective "private", see Inness, p. 13. ^

⁴ Magnusson, Lynne, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. ^

⁵ I am grateful to Anders Hansson and Juha Tähkämaa for this information. ^

⁶ David H. Flaherty, ed., Privacy and Data Protection: An International Bibliography, p. 5. ^

⁷ Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind, p. 82. Pinker's argument, which runs directly counter to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on language and culture, is sustained by recent work on human universals, described in more detail below. ^

⁸ Charles Taylor, "Understanding and Ethnocentricity", first published in 1981 and reprinted in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2, pp. 116-133, esp. p. 125. ^

⁹ Taylor, "Understanding and Ethnocentricity", pp. 125-26. ^

¹⁰ Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson do not mention problems in using the English words private and privacy in in their standard work on Bakhtin, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. On the Russian vocabulary for public and private realms, see Marc Garcelon, "The Shadow of the Leviathan: Public and Private in Communist and Post-Communist Society" and Oleg Kharkhordin, "Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia", both in Public and Private in Thought and Practice, pp. 303-32, esp. pp. 304-05, 318, 325 and pp. 333-63, esp. 342-45, 358. ^

¹¹ Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 383. ^

¹² Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 388-91. Morson & Emerson observe at this point that "These passages about spying and eavesdropping could (but do not have to) to be taken as allusions to Stalinist conditions and culture." ^

¹³ Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 394. ^

¹⁴ Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 395. ^

¹⁵ Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 401 ^

¹⁶ Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 402. ^

¹⁷ Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, p. 405. ^

¹⁸ For a general introduction to Elias's main works and influence, see Norbert Elias, On Civilization, Power, and Knowledge, edited by Stephen Mennell and Johan Goudsblom, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998. ^

¹⁹ Elias, Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, pp. 117-21, 105-110. ^

²⁰ Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 43. ^

²¹ Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 99, 103. ^

²² Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, especially Chapter 2, The Public and the Private Realm", pp. 22-78. For the shift in meaning from "deprivation" to a condition of intimacy, see p. 38; for the blurring of what was originally a physical boundary, see p. 69. ^

²³ As summarised in Schneider, p. 45; see also Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 51-52 and 73-75. ^

²⁴ See Krishan Kuman, "Home: The Promise and Predicament of Private Life at the End of the Twentieth Century", in Weintraub and Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice, pp. 204-36, esp. pp. 213-14. ^

²⁵ Arendt's The Human Condition is quoted only on pp. 4 and 19 of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, but there are significant similarities in their treatment of private and public realms, e.g. in the Greek and Roman origins. ^

²⁶ Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and the Public Sphere", in Weintraub and Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice, pp. 75-102, esp. p. 83. ^

²⁷ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 141-51 and 151-59. ^

²⁸ Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man, Arrow Books, London, 1977, p. 153. ^

²⁹ Alan Wolfe, "Public and Private in Theory and Practice: Some Implications of an Uncertain Boundary", in Weintraub and Kumar, eds, Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, pp. 182-203, esp. pp. 182-88. ^

³⁰ George Steiner, "Literature and Post-History", in Steiner, Language and Silence, Essays 1958-1966, pp. 333-45, esp. pp.335-36. ^

³¹ Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 106. ^

³² Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 342. ^

³³ Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 265. ^

³⁴ Steiner, Language and Silence, pp. 100-01. ^

³⁵ See "What is Comparative Literature", in Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996, pp. 142-59, esp. his reference to Chinese and Arabic on p. 153. ^

³⁶ Jagodzinski, Cecile M., Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1999. ^

³⁷ Samuel H. Hofstadter and George Horowitz, The Right of Privacy, Central Book Company, New York, 1964, pp. 9-16. ^

³⁸ Hofstadter and Horowitz, The Right of Privacy, p. 3. ^

³⁹ Ruth Gavison, "Privacy and the limits of law", in Schoeman, The Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, pp. 346-402. ^

⁴⁰ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 31-32. ^

⁴¹ Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1965. ^

⁴² Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom, Bodley Head, London, 1967, pp. 7, 22. The chapter "The origins of modern claims to privacy" is reprinted in Schoeman, Philosophical Dimensitons of Privacy, pp. 56-74. ^

⁴³ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, p. 7. ^

⁴⁴ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 26-30, 39-42. ^

⁴⁵ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 8-11. ^

⁴⁶ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 11-21. Mead's work is very much criticised by the "universalist" anthropologists mentioned below. ^

⁴⁷ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 32-39. ^

⁴⁸ Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 42-51. ^

⁴⁹ Ferdinand David Schoeman, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, p. 1. ^

⁵⁰ Charles Fried, "Privacy" , in Schoeman, Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, pp. 203-22; p. 219, note 2. ^

⁵¹ Carl D. Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, rev. ed. 1992. ^

⁵² Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, foreword, pp. 1-8. ^

⁵³ Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, pp. 40-45. ^

⁵⁴ Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, p. 9. ^

⁵⁵ Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, pp. 46-48. ^

⁵⁶ Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, p. 49. ^

⁵⁷ Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, p. 50. ^

⁵⁸ Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, pp. 51-54. ^

⁵⁹ For Brown's summary of the case against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, see Human Universals, pp. 27-31. ^

⁶⁰ Summarised from Brown, Human Universals, by Pinker, The Language Instinct, pp. 413-15. ^

⁶¹ Brown, Human Universals, p. 135. ^

⁶² Brown, Human Universals, pp. 69-70. ^

⁶³ Charles Taylor, "Legitimate Crisis?", originally published in 1981, and reprinted in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2, pp. 141-51. ^

⁶⁴ Taylor, "Legitimate Crisis?", p. 261. ^

⁶⁵ Taylor, "Legitimate Crisis?", p. 262. ^

⁶⁶ Gavison, pp. 348-49. The terms secrecy, anonymity and solitude are explained as shorthand for the extent to which an individual is known, the extent to which an individual is the subject of attention, and the extent to which others have physical access to an an individual; p. 386, note 40. ^

⁶⁷ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 6-7. ^

⁶⁸ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 9-10. ^

⁶⁹ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 13-14. ^

⁷⁰ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 15-17. ^

⁷¹ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, p. 97 ^

⁷² Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 183-89. ^

⁷³ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 18-19, 190-97. ^

⁷⁴ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 22-25. ^

⁷⁵ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, pp. 26-38. ^

⁷⁶ Nobel & Nobel, The Private Me, p. 83. ^

⁷⁷ For the distinction between secrecy and privacy, see Secrets, pp. 10-14; for privacy as a legal right, see pp. 90, 141. ^

⁷⁸ Moore, Privacy, p. ix. ^

⁷⁹ For example, why is excretion conducted in seclusion? because it's messy and might get in the way during cooking; see Moore, Privacy, pp. 59-71. ^

⁸⁰ Moore, Privacy, p. 223. ^

⁸¹ Moore, Privacy, pp. 252-66. ^

⁸² Moore, Privacy, p. 75. ^

⁸³ Moore, Privacy, pp. 271, 272-75. ^

⁸⁴ Schoeman, Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, p. 14. ^

⁸⁵ Moore, Privacy, pp. 16-19. ^

⁸⁶ Schoeman, pp. 13-14. ^

⁸⁷ Scott, Mind Your Own Business, p. 41. ^

⁸⁸ Scott, Mind Your Own Business, p. 249. ^

⁸⁹ Deckle McClean's Privacy and its Invasion, Praeger, Westport, 1995. ^

⁹⁰ McClean, Privacy and its Invasion, pp. 1-2. ^

⁹¹ McClean, Privacy and its Invasion, p. 3. ^

⁹² McClean, Privacy and its Invasion, pp. 6, 61-69. ^

⁹³ McClean, Privacy and its Invasion, p. 16. ^

⁹⁴ McClean, Privacy and its Invasion, pp. 47-60. ^

⁹⁵ T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999, pp. 338-342. ^

⁹⁶ From a review by Thomas Nagel, LRB, 4.2.99, pp. 3-6. [check] ^

⁹⁷ Amitai Etzioni, The Limits of Privacy, New York, 1999. ^

⁹⁸ Alan Westin and Michael A. Baker, Databanks in a Free Society, p. 249. ^

⁹⁹ Computers and Privacy in the Next Decade, edited by Lance J. Hoffman. ^

¹⁰⁰ Alan F. Westin, The Dimensions of Privacy: A National Opinion Research Survey of Attitudes Towards Privacy, pp. 3 & 5. ^

¹⁰¹ Craig T. Norback, The Computer Invasion, p. v. ^

¹⁰² David H. Flaherty, ed., Privacy and Data Protection: An International Bibliography, builds on an earlier work of the same name, published in 1979. The successor volume, published in 1984, bears a tribute to George Orwell. ^

¹⁰³ First published in Yale Law Journal, 89 (1980), pp. 421-71; reprinted in Schoeman, Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, pp. 346-402. ^

¹⁰⁴ H. Jeff Smith, Managing Privacy: Information Technology and Corporate America, p. 1. ^

¹⁰⁵ Bruce Schneier and David Baniser, The Electronic Privacy Papers; applies mainly to the United States. ^

¹⁰⁶ The Economist, cover story survey, 5 December 1998, pp. 3-15. ^

¹⁰⁷ The Economist, leader on privacy in consumer data protection, "Data dogfights", 9 January 1999, p. 17; letter on "Data dogfights", 23 January 1999, p. 6. ^

¹⁰⁸ The Times Literary Supplement, 14 August 1998, p. 15. ^

¹⁰⁹ The Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 1998, p. 17. ^

¹¹⁰ Recent attention to this aspect has been given by Jeff Weintraub in "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction" and Alan Wolfe, "Public and Private in Theory and Practice: Some Implications of an Uncertain Boundary", both in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds, Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, pp. 1-42, esp. p. 2, and pp. 182-203, esp. p. 182. ^

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