Book details of 'Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet'

Title	Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet
Author(s)	Robert Ellis Smith
ISBN	0930072146
Language	English
Published	June 2000
Publisher	Privacy Journal

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
In the introduction, Smith notes that Americans are both (and simultaneously) interested in protecting their privacy, and very curious about others. This work is a social history of American thought and feelings about privacy. The chapters are not numbered, but named. There is an attempt to assign date ranges to periods of events and opinion, but this effort is pretty much exhausted by the time the book ends. "Watchfulness," from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, notes an age of church based communities and close living. Fear of the government registration is suggested to be primarily based on anxiety about the fact that a low population (or other indicator of lack of wealth) would reflect badly on the locale (or locals). "Serenity" links geographic isolation with privacy, but mostly concentrates on early enumeration operations. The post office, more about the census, and the beginnings of information technology with Hollerith and Morse is in a chapter called "Mistrust." "Space" outlines the degradations of slavery, factories, and workhouses. "Curiosity" looks at gossip and the popular press. A chapter called "Brandeis" doesn't talk about him or his essay (with Warren in the Harvard Law Review) as much as the intellectual environment and subsequent debate. Another reviews decisions and government actions in regard to different types of surveillance. It is difficult to say what a chapter called "Sex" has to do with privacy, and it reuses a lot of material from "Serenity," "Curiosity," and "Brandeis." "Torts" examines various lawsuits related to invasion of privacy. Politicking on the Supreme Court in cases possibly related to privacy populates a chapter called "Constitution." "Numbers," unlike "Census," discusses the improper use of the Social Security Number, as well as the concept of a national identity card. Credit reporting agencies are examined in "Databanks." "Cyberspace" touches on a number of Internet related topics. "Ben Franklin's Web Site" attempts to guess what Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac" would say about privacy, in pithy aphorisms: a kind of Poor Robert's list of privacy protecting guidelines. Smith's book is certainly an entertaining read, and does provide the occasional lost nugget of significant information on the development of thought in regard to privacy. It is, however, difficult to say how useful the work is for practical endeavours in pursuit of the protection of privacy, or development of current privacy policy. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2003
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Book description:

This new book explores the hidden niches of American history to discover the tug between Americans' yearning for privacy and their insatiable curiosity. The book describes Puritan monitoring in Colonial New England, then shows how the attitudes of the founders placed the concept of privacy in the Constitution. This panoramic view continues with the coming of tabloid journalism in the Nineteenth Century, and the reaction to it in the form of a new right - the right to privacy. The book includes histories of wiretapping, of credit reporting, of sexual practices, of Social Security numbers and ID cards, of modern principles of privacy protection, and of the coming of the Internet and the new challenges to personal privacy it brings. "Robert Ellis Smith's expose of privacy invasion will be one of the sleeper best-selling books..." wrote columnist William Safire in The New York Times, December 1999. "His numerous books are required reading for anyone concerned about the ongoing threats," said Simson Garfinkel in Database Nation, 2000. Here's a chapter-by-chapter description: "Watchfulness" describes church monitoring in the Colonial period. "Serenity" shows the craving for solitude by our founders, which shaped the rights they enshrined in the Constitution. "Mistrust" recounts early battles over confidentiality in the Post Office, the Census, and Western Union. "Space" describes the quest for privacy in living arrangements (including the first moves to suburbia after the Civil War) and the lack of privacy on Southern plantations. "Curiosity" traces the epic development of sensational journalism in the Nineteenth Century. "Brandeis" chronicles how Louis Brandeis reacted to gossip journalism and other new technology by "inventing" a legal right to privacy. "Wiretaps" is the story of electronic surveillance from the invention of the telephone to the 1970s. "Sex" traces changing attitudes towards sexual privacy over two centuries, and provides a chronicle of a Clintonesque sex scandal that changed attitudes forever after the 1880s. "Torts" describes court battles that eventually provided great latitude for gossip journalism. "The Constitution" is a remarkable new look at the very narrow decisions of the Supreme Court that shaped the very narrow Constitutional protections for privacy in the Twenty-first Century. "Numbers" tells for the first time where Social Security numbers came from and how they are used now, and describes subtle political efforts to create a universal identity document in the U.S. "Databanks" provides histories of credit reporting, database marketing, and government record keeping from the 1950s to the present. "Cyberspace" is a look back at the overnight development of the World Wide Web and its impact on personal privacy. Lastly, the epilogue entitled "Ben Franklin's Web Site" offers specific tips for protecting your privacy. It is modern guidance that Ben Franklin himself would have provided on his Web site.