The Boston Phoenix published this editorial earlier this week:
Privacy, in the scheme of things, is a relatively new invention. Our ancestors began walking on their hind legs about 200,000 years ago, but it took them another 150,000 years before they got around to building cities and thus having anything worth being private about.
In An Essay on Civil Society, published in Edinburg in 1767, Adam Ferguson observed, “Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization.” Privacy has advanced from an especially Western idea that is particularly intense among citizens of the United Kingdom and United States.
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