This post continues an arc on online privacy started in Online Privacy, Part 1. So far we've covered some of the history of privacy and we conclude that theme in this post...Two hundred years ago people didn't carry identification with them (if anyone can tell me the real difference between "Your papers, please?" and being asked to show a photo-id when you use a credit card or cash a check, I'd love to hear it) and there was no national citizenship registry until the turn of the 18th century. At this point in time, European countries began enforcing the concept of "One person, one name". Prior to that any given person could have several of what we now call "aliases" and nobody cared because most of the aliases were nicknames given to an individual by people in that individual's social circle ("Morgan the Goat", "Johnnie One-Eye", "Velmuth the Butcher") or by society assigning a role to the individual ("Typhoid Mary", George "Longhair" Custer, "Atilla the Chiropodist").
Up until mass transportation and the industrial age, people worked from their homes. They lived above their smithy, next to their fields, on their farm, beside their grainery, with their animals, ... Anonymity and privacy didn't exist and where it did, it was a cause for suspicion and distrust; if someone had something to hide, it was for a reason, and the xenophobic natures which benefited us when we descended from the trees still served us well during these times. (to be continued...)
(Information in this arc is from Chapter 7, "Experience Versus Expectation" of my next book, Reading Virtual Minds. Text and images copyright Joseph Carrabis and NextStage Evolution 2006-2007)
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