Languages of Privacy
This post first appeared on the blog for the Centre for Privacy Studies: https://privacy.hypotheses.org/1492 Spread across different European contexts, when we dig just a little bit, we can find many historical linguistic traces showing how diverse the language to speak about privacy can be. By attending to these historical traces, we can notice that exercises in theorizing, defining, or formally conceptualizing privacy—especially those attempts anchored in a modern-day view of privacy and of the private—are bound to find more than a few similarities and affinities with the past. The ideas behind the concept of privacy were already manifested, historically, in the languages that people used and adapted to speak about their attempts and strategies at controlling access to themselves and to information about themselves. And there have always been a lot of cross-fertilization among the languages. Let me share with you some examples I've been thinking about. In contexts where English