- Thinkstock
- Young people eschew privacy for their “global village.”
America began as a largely rural country, and it could be that the Founding Fathers, to the extent they gave privacy a thought, figured that in the towns and villages they hailed from everyone knew everybody’s business anyway. The Constitution they wrote doesn’t mention privacy. This put Supreme Court justice William Douglas to the test in 1965, when the Court voted 7-2 to strike down an 1879 Connecticut law forbidding use of “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.”
This very observation is made over and over in a report released Thursday morning by the Pew Research Center, The Future of Privacy. Pew doesn’t know what that future is, but it asked more than 2,500 technology experts and analysts to weigh in. Then it sorted out where they stand.
It’s not that the old-fashioned privacy valued by William Douglas will go away completely. Pew’s experts see it heading in two directions—to the top of the pecking order, and the bottom. It’ll become the kind of privacy that James Bond has been fighting forever: the kind guarded by rich men holed up in impenetrable fortresses. “Privacy will be a luxury not a right—something that the well-to-do can afford but which most have learnt to live without,” predicts Finnish academic Alf Rehn.
