Google’s Cerf Says “Privacy May Be An Anomaly”. Historically, He’s Right.

One of the original architects of the Internet wants to remind us that privacy is a relatively new concept. “Privacy is something which has emerged out of the urban boom coming from the industrial revolution,” said Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and a lead engineer on the Army’s early 1970′s Internet prototype, ARPANET. As a result, ‘privacy may actually be an anomaly,” he told a gathering of the Federal Trade Commission.

Looking back at history, Cerf is mostly right.

Up until the 19th century, most houses had few or no internal walls. Bathing was a public act. For most of the post-Roman era, the very concept of “solitude” was limited to clergy, who dedicated their lives to private worship. “Intercourse, birth, death, just about every aspect of the life cycle plays out with some sort of audience,” architectural historian Bernard Herman explained to me.

An expert in early American housing, Herman found that the average home was about 16