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Lawrence Cappello. None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

2021

Publication Title

American Historical Review

Abstract

It’s a good bet that if you open any newspaper today, you’ll find a story dealing in some way with privacy, whether COVID-19 vaccine and contact tracing, data breaches, government surveillance, or the always-on microphones in Amazon’s Alexa digital assistants. What’s more, if you consume your news in a digital format, you can read about privacy at the same time that the website or app is tracking you, noting your reading preferences to power its “ad-tech” algorithms about what advertisements are most likely to get you to buy something from one of its advertiser clients. Privacy seems very much about the here and now, but it also has a fascinating and important history in American life and law. Yet the concept of privacy has been relatively under-studied by academic historians. This is a curious and regrettable omission, because so many fights over privacy in America since the Gilded Age have been struggles over human and social power of the sort historians have elsewhere examined so effectively.

Keywords

Privacy, Privacy Law, Internet, Data Protection

Publication Citation

Neil M. Richards, Lawrence Cappello. None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, 126 Am. Historical Rev. 1280 (2021)

Comments

A review of Lawrence Cappello. None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019

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