In the late Eighties, I was an Account Coordinator (read: secretary) at an advertising agency in midtown Manhattan. Our desks were arranged in an open space so that each desk sat conveniently outside a Supervisor's office door. The woman at the desk behind me—let's call her Jennifer—made personal calls throughout the day. At top volume, Jennifer would converse with her mother, husband, friends, even her gynecologist. Fortunately, after several months the office was renovated and freestanding cubicles were installed. At the time, critics derided this innovation as an impediment to office solidarity, as instilling a dehumanizing, worker-bee mentality. But how I loved the privacy of the padded semi-walls, softly comforting in industrial gray. Jennifer's voice was reduced to innocuous background noise, like the hum of the computer or a jackhammer on the street below.
These days, I am bombarded by Jennifer-like conversations on all sides: waiting in line at the supermarket, in restaurants, even on the beach. I can't help but feel that the difference between personal and public has eroded. For example, on Christmas Eve, I waited in the car while my husband and children ran into the Blockbuster on the corner of Amsterdam and 69th. I watched them argue through the plate glass window, my husband pointing to a DVD, my daughter with her arms crossed over her chest, my son shaking his head— while I was distracted. A round man, looming large in a doorman uniform and Santa hat, spoke volubly into his cell phone. "I could deal with it better," he said, "if I weren't sober. She called three weeks ago and left a message on my machine asking me if I want the ring back." He paced back and forth, staggering slightly, a bottle of Seven-Up clutched in one arm as if it were a bottle of Jim Beam. Who was he talking to, I wondered. His AA sponsor? A friend? Why did I care?
In her book Talk to the Hand, manners maven Lynne Truss commiserates, "We are forced to listen, openmouthed, to other people's intimate conversations, property transactions, business arrangements, and even criminal deals." The notion of baring one's soul to obtain absolution or gain recognition of a particular issue seems to have trickled down to street level. When Tanya reveals that she's slept with Tony, her husband's brother, on Montel, or Teri Hatcher confesses in Vanity Fair that her uncle sexually abused her, perhaps we feel validated in having that argument with our boyfriend via cell phone on 72nd Street. I find it hard to imagine House of Mirth's Lily Bart pouring out her financial woes to Lawrence Seldon or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights complaining that no one really understands him. Nineteenth Century literary characters were big on reticence. Contrast this quaint stoicism with a recent memoir by New York Post columnist Elizabeth Hayt: "Slowly, I pulled my top over my head and let his eyes roam over my breasts in green lace demi-cups."
In a more subtle way, our privacy is compromised daily in nearly every consumer transaction. Paging through the L.L. Bean catalog one day, I saw a lovely periwinkle Polartec fleece. Credit card in hand, I dialed their 800 number. Before I'd said a word, the order taker greeted me by name. After I placed my order, she asked, "Will you be charging this on your Visa today?" Ostensibly, the customer service was outstanding; yet I came away feeling that the whole thing was kind of creepy. I couldn't help thinking of George Orwell's 1984, where citizens are under constant surveillance by Big Brother.
Purchasing a cup of coffee in the Border's Bookstore Café, I was asked by the clerk for my email address. "Why do you need that?" I asked. "So you can receive updates, coupons, and a weekly guide," she explained. "No thank you," I answered, though I was sorely tempted by the coupons, and slunk away to sip my Vanilla Latte and peruse the New Yorker.
Several months later I stopped into Radio Shack to purchase a $50 gift certificate. "Driver's license, please," the clerk said. I told him I didn't see why this was necessary as I was, after all, paying cash. I asked to speak to the manager. A perspiring man with smudged glasses, the manager explained that they needed the information for verification purposes. He assured me my privacy would be protected. And furthermore, they wouldn't sell me the gift card otherwise. After typing in my information, the clerk requested my telephone number. What used to be a simple cash transaction had now turned into something akin to registering to vote. According the American Civil Liberty Union's report, Privacy in America,
One in five adults in this country now regularly communicates and shops electronically. Vast quantities of confidential and sensitive information are stored in computers. They're also transferred electronically—via the Internet—from individuals to banks, businesses and hospitals.
In this way, personal information translates into private information. In a given day, retail scanners gather seemingly innocuous data about the minutia of our lives—everything from pregnancy tests to pornography, sushi to size six sandals. And our willingness to yield up our phone numbers when purchasing batteries contributes to an increasingly blurry line between public and private.
TV crime dramas reinforce the feeling of continuous scrutiny: on CSI, absurdly good-looking agents collect infinitesimal pieces of evidence, on Law & Order the bad guys are traced through ATM surveillance cameras, E-Z Pass, and credit card use. Techies hack into by the bad guy's computer, conjuring up the smoking gun from emails the perpetrator thought deleted. The 2002 movie, Phone Booth, plays with our paranoia about having our personal information used against us. Stuart Shepard, a callow PR man who is cheating on his wife, becomes ensnared in a killer's plot to do away with corruption. Although Stuart has been careful to call his mistress from a phone booth so his wife won't see the call on the bill, the killer has tracked his every move in some mysterious computer hacking way that is communicated through shots of fingers frantically tapping a keyboard. The message is clear: you are being watched.
In his book, The End of Privacy, Reg Whitaker writes,
Perhaps the ultimate reason for the weakness of the movement against the encroachments of private data bases lies in the positive benefits most people perceive from handing over personal information to corporations and marketers […] If privacy is conceptualized as the negative defense of the isolated stand-alone individual against society, its passing need not perhaps be mourned too deeply. But if we think of surveillance and privacy in social terms, as a complex of factors that shape the individual within society, the outlook is more worrisome.
We have to ask ourselves at what price do we sell our privacy.
Certainly, cell phones and confessional talk shows were around well before September 11th, 2001. Since then, however, the transmutation of private into public has primed us for the erosion of privacy as public policy. With the threat of terror as justification, our government insists on the right to protect us by literally tapping into our telephone conversations. According to the ACLU's report on the Pentagon's "Total Information Awareness" Program, "The information that is generated and retained about our activities is becoming so rich that if all that information about us was put together, it would almost be like having a video camera following us around." If Big Brother isn't watching, he certainly has the tools to do so now.
Works Cited:
"Privacy in America: Computers, Phones & Privacy." June 26, 1998. Retrieved April 1, 2006.
"Q&A on the Pentagon's 'Total Information Awareness' Program." April 20, 2003. Retrieved April 1, 2006.
Truss, Lynn. Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. NY: Gotham Books. 2005
Whitaker, Reg. The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality. NY: The New Press. 1999
