Fighting for Personal Data Protection
Brendan O'Neill's Electric Review
16th June 2025 Picture by: Getty.
Privacy is dead, and society seems none the wiser. This is the provocative thesis put forth in Tiffany Jenkins's brilliant new book, Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. The once-sacred sanctuary of the private sphere is vanishing before our very eyes, and we hardly know what we've lost.
2009 saw former Google CEO Eric Schmidt infamously declare, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." This chilling, technocratic statement has come to embody the mindset of our times, where privacy is treated with suspicion rather than revered as a fundamental right.
Jenkins's book is a bold and decisive riposte to such sentiments. Deftly tracing the historical roots of our malaise with privacy, she meticulously demonstrates that the distinction between public and private life is not a given, but the hard-won achievement of the Enlightenment. Birthed out of the Protestant Reformation, the private sphere was a welcome refuge from the world, a sanctuary for freethinking and self-development. A space in which one could cultivate autonomy.
In Strangers and Intimates, Jenkins avoids the temptation of harking nostalgically to a bygone age of privacy. Instead, she delivers a gripping account of its historical evolution, from the alternately revered and maligned "citizen secret" of Ancient Sparta to the "one-self" of contemporary hypercapitalism.
The book's exploration of the private sphere's origins is both fascinating and revelatory. We learn, for instance, that John Stuart Mill's convictions regarding the private self were spurred by his passion for the poetry of William Wordsworth. Or how the early Suffragettes, in their fight for women's rights, demanded privacy as a means of resisting state power over families and households. Jenkins masterfully weaves together these historical threads, showing how the private sphere emerged as a product of struggle and negotiation.
Jenkins's expertly crafted narrative is far from academic dryness. Her writing is crisp and engaging, making complex historical processes easily digestible for even the casual reader. Moreover, she deftly integrates contemporary concerns about privacy into her analysis, without allowing them to overshadow the larger historical picture.
Jenkins does not simply echo the concerns of contemporary digital-rights campaigners, whose focus on surveillance and data protection often neglects the broader context of privacy's historical evolution. Instead, she offers a more comprehensive understanding of privacy, demonstrating how it has been shaped by its historical entanglements with ideologies like citizenship, liberty, and the self.
More importantly, Jenkins does not shirk from addressing the elephant in the room: the role of the Left in eroding privacy's foundations. She takes aim at the radical feminist mantra that "the personal is political," an ideological position that turned private relationships into contested political turf and opened the door to state intervention in the most intimate aspects of life. In doing so, she provides a caustic critique of the egregious Named Persons scheme proposed by the Scottish government, which sought to assign a state guardian to every child, effectively granting the state entry into the most private of spaces.
In the final chapter, Jenkins issues a clarion call for a return to the value of privacy. She argues that it is not just an essential prerequisite for introspection and contemplation, but the cornerstone of genuine individual autonomy and independence. In an era defined by emotional transparency and identity performance, her message is, to put it mildly, desperately needed.
But rather than simply mourning the loss of privacy, Jenkins offers a strategy for its recovery. She prescribes a revitalization of the public realm, where democratic engagement and open debate can flourish once more. She also advocates for the protection of private life, insisting that it is not a luxury but a necessity for a truly free society.
Strangers and Intimates is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities and contradictions of contemporary society. It is a work that transcends the limitations of the contemporary debate on privacy and offers instead a nuanced historical analysis that is both rigorous and accessible. Far from a lament for the lost privacy of the past, it is a rallying cry for the possibilities of the future.
Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, by Tiffany Jenkins, is now available from Picador.
- In her book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, Tiffany Jenkins critiques the role of identity politics, particularly radical feminist ideologies that consider the personal as political, in eroding privacy's foundations.
- Despite cancel culture's emphasis on openness and emotional transparency, Tiffany Jenkins in her book Strangers and Intimates advocates for the protection of private life as a cornerstone of genuine individual autonomy and independence.
- Jenkins's book, Strangers and Intimates, explores the intertwining of privacy with culture, politics, books, and entertainment throughout history, offering a comprehensive understanding of privacy that goes beyond contemporary digital-rights concerns.
