Family Security Matters » Publications » American Privacy Standards Don’t Match the Rhetoric

Family Security Matters » Publications » American Privacy Standards Don’t Match the Rhetoric: "Americans are a prickly lot when it comes to privacy – or so they say. Some chafe at the very idea of the government knowing anything about them (“Big Brother Is Watching You,” as George Orwell’s 1984 warned). Some people even resist filling out the census forms in the paranoid belief that the shared information will come back to oppress them.

But at the same time, we are the most open, most blabber-mouthed population there has ever been, as can be seen on intrusive reality television programs
, Facebook, and other sites that reveal everything about a person that we never wanted to know. How much can we love our privacy when we do this?

Privacy in history and around the world differs greatly from that in our own culture. Private rooms for sleeping were not part of Europe’s culture until the 18th century – and even then, siblings of the same sex slept together in a bed. Before that time, people lived together with no privacy available nor expected. If parents were prosperous enough, they had a marriage bed with curtains around it (kings included), but their sexual activities were not kept from their children or retainers."