A few thoughts on privacy
I’ve been working for the census, and this has involved trying to find out who (if anyone) lives in various houses, apartments, condos and duplex or triplex flats from which nobody has sent a census response. This has led me to think about privacy, which a lot of people are worried about, but I have counter-examples I’ll mention briefly here.
One change since my childhood that I’ve seldom seen noted, but which I think has social consequences, is there’s no longer a phone book. It used to be that it was an exception not to be in the book – you had to make an effort not to be listed, so virtually everyone was in it. I think you even had to pay a fee to be left out (these were the glory days of Bell Canada’s monopoly). Now you can look someone up on canada411.ca if they have a landline and it’s listed, but that’s only a fraction of the phones in the city. Otherwise there’s no way to know.
A parallel change: when there was an election, enumerators went around and took down everyone’s address and particulars. Yes, this was done every time. And then all the sheets were stapled up on a pole on the corner of the street. You could verify your own entry, but you could also find out what your neighbours’ names were, and what they did for a living. Often this was the only time you found these things out.
The matter I’ve mentioned elsewhere about media being coy when incidents happen – “a restaurant in Ahuntsic” or whatever, no name, no address – is also a gradual social change. Look back at newspapers from the early to mid 20th century and they’re full of personal names and business names and addresses when there’s a story to be told.
So, in some ways we’re actually getting more private, and making it harder for people to find out about each other, rather than the reverse.
CE 15:46 on 2021-08-08 Permalink
There used to be ways to find out bits and pieces of information (telephone numbers, professions, addresses) about individuals but you still had to go searching for them and were often not easily accessible (phone book excluded). Fast forward to the internet age and while it might be difficult to find someone’s phone number, much, much more information about a person is available and easy to find.
In the past, if, for example, you were arrested for committing a crime, it would likely be breathlessly printed up in the newspaper but after a couple days, would be largely forgotten by anyone that doesn’t know you and would be increasingly difficult to find the details as time passes (one week after, you’d have to dig through the pile on newspapers in your house, after a couple weeks, look for it at the library, after a year or so, consult the microfiches). Now, a quick Google search of your name will tell you that information right away and will be there for a long time. I imagine it’s why newspapers are reluctant to print the name of a business where a crime has been committed. If someone was shot outside XYZ Ltd. in Villeray, a Google search for “XYZ Ltd. Villeray” on Google is going to cause that business to be associated with the shooting for a very long time, even though it was closed that day and had nothing to do with the event.
Radiolab did an episode on this issue a while ago and goes in depth on how this kind of quick and long-lasting access to information affects us all in a way that it didn’t in the past. I really recommend taking a listen to it.
PatrickC 17:18 on 2021-08-08 Permalink
Very interesting to think about these changes. To the phone book I would add the Lovell’s directory, organized by street address. Not automatically distributed like the phone book, but commonly available. You can now search them online (and it’s fascinating!). And didn’t letters to the editor in the newspapers also use to include the writer’s address?
Not on the same level, but you could think of marriage banns from the same perspective. Traditionally, the names of the couple would be read out in church (not just to those invited to the nuptials) on three successive Sundays, in advance of the famous “speak now or forever hold your peace” thing, to help prevent illicit or fraudulent marriages.
Kate 17:30 on 2021-08-08 Permalink
PatrickC, I’ve used Lovell for some genealogical research. The federal government also has census stuff up to 1921 and voters’ lists to 1988.
I think our sense of what should be private has changed a lot in a generation, is what it comes to. But CE has a point about information hanging around to be Googled for a long time.
Max 19:21 on 2021-08-08 Permalink
It’s disturbing how little control we have over our privacy these days. My late father’s name shows up on a bunch of American web sites just because he owned a vacation property in Florida for a time. My brother’s name shows up on a few Canadian sites simply because he was president of his condo association. Despite my best own efforts at laying as low as possible even my own name (first initial only thankfully) and an address I no longer live at are on the web because some asshole decided to scan and OCR a 1990s phone book. I tried to contact the owner of that site to have my data removed, but to no avail of course.
Kate 20:48 on 2021-08-08 Permalink
Max, did it bother you back in the day when you were listed in the phone book?
I think people now are bothered by “privacy” issues that are actually no more serious than being in the phone book, back in the day.
Maybe I’m still arguing in my head with an old coworker who used to go on and on about it, but when asked what negative effects he had experienced from being, for example, in the phone book (or modern equivalent), he couldn’t name any. It was just a tendency to want to “lay as low as possible” as you say. I don’t think he had anyone to hide from, although I can’t be sure about that.
walkerp 10:02 on 2021-08-09 Permalink
This is a really interesting and informative observation, Kate. It’s worth a real study. It’s amazing how the culture can change in a few decades with a lot of paid propaganda to the point that people assume it was always this way. It’s very similar with taxes, where we have this insane aversion to any tax rate. If you asked, a lot of people would say that taxes used to be low and have gone up when in reality tax rates after WWII went up to 90%.
I think a lot of the current obsession with privacy is related to the culture of extreme individualism pushed by the right-wing since the Reagan years. It’s orthogonal to “you can’t tell me what to do.”
And then the real privacy concerns in the digital realm have only amplified that (erroneously of course, as the gullible continue to freak out about their “freedom” and “privacy” vis a vis the government while giving both away freely to private enterprise).