Privacy: A Word Losing Its

Meaning in The 21st Century

By ChRistopher Joseph
XII A
Roll No: 9
Preface
In the story “Going Places” by A.R. Barton, the need for
privacy can be seen. The story revolves around a teenage
girl Sophie, her family, and her friends. She is a
daydreamer, who is always lost in her dreams of becoming
rich and sophisticated though, in reality, she is a worker at a
biscuit factory. The story suddenly twists up when Sophie
makes a wild imagination of meeting Danny Casey, a
famous footballer. She also makes a story in front of her
brother that Casey will come to meet her on a fixed day as
per a promise he made to her. However, her brother tells
their father of this, and Sophie is ridiculed as a result.
Sophie ends up regretting her decision and struggling with
anxiety if her father gets to know more about her imagined
meetings with Casey. She even doubts her friend Jansie, a
tell-tale and wonders if she has told about the meetings to
the whole neighbourhood already.
 El Salvador journalists and activists hacked with
spyware, report says¹

Pegasus Spyware Deployed Against El Salvador

Journalists and Activists²

Pegasus spyware ‘found on phone of a jailed critic of

Narendra Modi ’³

If you suspect being targeted with Pegasus, get in touch

by January 7: Supreme Court panel⁴

These are some headlines that have appeared in our

newspapers and news channels for the past 6 months.
They all involve governments of various countries
hacking and illegally snooping on the very citizens who
elected them. Such a breach of trust and privacy is so
grave that it is equivalent to tearing up the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which ironically was
passed decades ago by many of the countries that are now
defaulters by this specific line in Article 12 of the
document as mentioned earlier.

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with

his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to
attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the
right to the protection of the law against such
interference or attacks. ”⁵

Every human, irrespective of their standing in society has

a right (to put it crudely) to be left alone. Every human
should be allowed to have control of their life without the
prying of outsiders. Ours isn’t the only generation that is
guilty of trespassing this statute. In the following pages,
we shall now turn back the pages of time to examine the
transgressions of our forebears, evaluate whether our
governments in the present are “Big Brothers” (a term
coined by the 20th-century author, George Orwell for a
person or organization exercising total control over
people’s lives), try to predict how far government control
over human life shall grow and see the views of people on
their privacy, all in 1000 words for less.

(⁶)

If one were to stroll through the streets of late 19th Century

New York, one would see newsboys hawking newspapers
reporting the latest political happenings such as The New
York Tribune, or the latest revelations of corruption in
papers such as The Cosmopolitan. If you would have
observed closely, you would see some papers(tabloids)
filled with scandals, and claims of immoral behavior by the
elites. These tabloids used invasive methods for reporting
outrageous news, which would increase circulation and
ultimately leads to surges in profits. Even nowadays, such
“Yellow Journalism” exists, often using software to hack
phones to obtain text messages and installing cameras to
record evidence to broadcast on primetime television.

To say that such methods can be pardoned due to the

non-existence of the idea that humanity has a Right to
Privacy would be wrong. The concept of the Right to
Privacy of found in the Decretum Gratiani in Bologna, Italy
from the 12th century stating:

“a right - an entitlement a person possesses to control or

claim something”⁽⁷⁾

which in this case be a man’s Right to Possess the details of

his circumstances or his life. In the United States, an article
in the December 15, 1890 issue of the Harvard Law
Review, written by attorney Samuel D. Warren and future
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, titled "The
Right to Privacy", is often cited as the first mention of a
U.S. right to privacy. They wrote that privacy is the "right
to be let alone", and focused on protecting individuals. This
was a response to technological developments of the time,
such as photography and yellow journalism.⁽⁸⁾ The public
and corporate demand for extravagant transparency of
one’s life led to the first musings of a Right to Privacy

Above is a map of the world with countries being

highlighted with different colors. One can see Red, Orange,
Yellow, Peach, Light Green, and grey. These colors depict
how strong privacy laws are in a country and how much the
government surveils its own citizens. Green means the
country consistently upholds human rights standards on
privacy. But you will fail to observe green in this map of
reds, oranges, and greys. The only light green one can see
is upon Greece. The reds mean that a country is an endemic
surveillance society, oranges stand for extensive
surveillance societies and yellow is for systemic failure to
uphold safeguards for privacy.

This is the state of today’s world. Ever since the 9/11

attacks and the passing of the Patriot Act in the United
States(effectively lets the U.S. government investigate
anyone it sees fit, colliding directly with one of the most
cherished American values: a citizen's right to privacy),
there has been an increase in surveillance states and a
disregard for an individual’s Right To Privacy: face
recognition technology in China,web-censorship in Syria,
corporate entities like Facebook(now Meta) selling user
data and even phone hacking of the British Royals by
tabloids and paparazzi.

However, we still have reason to hope. When I reached out

to people from different age groups, the responses I got
were reassuring. Almost everyone said they knew their data
could be accessed without permission. They were aware of
the “Pegasus Spyware”, a trojan used by governments
worldwide to jailbreak phones and spy on their own
citizens. They also said they take measures to prevent
third-party access to their data. Civic awareness of modern
problems is the only way to generate solutions in the
modern age.
Afterword

‘We are the dead,’ he said.

‘We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully.

‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.⁽⁹⁾

This excerpt from George Orwell’s “1984” is a chilling

reminder of what surveillance in the future could become.
Julia and Winston are being spied upon by a microphone
and a camera hidden in a room without their knowledge by
The Party in order to gain evidence to arrest them for
treason when they just start thinking that maybe The Party
isn’t the best form of government in their world. This
chilling prophecy is being fulfilled now in various countries
where individualism is oppressed. We must not only hope
that in the future, the world does not become similar to the
world in the book “1984”, but we must engrave the need
for the Right to Privacy in the minds of our children, who
will be making decisions that could change the world in the
decades to come.

(1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-59979073
(2) https://www.wsj.com/articles/pegasus-spyware-deployed-against-around-35-el-salvador-journalist
s-11642040676
(3) https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/dec/17/pegasus-spyware-found-on-phone-of-jailed-criti
c-of-narendra-modi-
(4) https://indianexpress.com/article/india/pegasus-spyware-panel-suprene-court-january-7-7702565/
(5) Article 12, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(6) "The Yellow Press", by L. M. Glackens, portrays William Randolph Hearst as a jester distributing
sensational stories
(7) James Griffin (1 November 2007). "The Human Right to Privacy" . San Diego Law Review.
(8) Warren and Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy", 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890)
(9) 1984,George Orwell