The battle between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know has been fought for centuries. The founders demanded privacy for all the wrong press-quashing reasons, while Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously promoted First Amendment freedoms but argued strongly for privacy too; and presidents from Thomas Jefferson through Donald Trump confidently hid their private lives despite intense public interest.
Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging. And that’s doubly dangerous, as legal expert Amy Gajda argue in her new book, Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy. Too little privacy can mean extraordinary profits and power for people who deal in and publish soul-crushing secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy. This fascinating and necessary book shows us how the answers may not be what you expect, or hope, how technology makes these issues more complicated than ever before.
Amy Gajda is one of the country’s top experts on privacy and the media. An award-winning writer and legal commentator, her work has frequently appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and elsewhere.
