When it was revealed that the NSA was spying on people both inside and outside of the US with its massive PRISM program, critics were quick to state that doing so is a violation of people’s right to privacy.  But is privacy real or is it just a concept?

Speaking at an FTC event, Vint Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist stated that, “Privacy may actually be an anomaly.”

What exactly does he mean by this?

Cerf made an example of his childhood, growing up in a small town where everyone knew everyone, where the postmaster at the local post office would see who’s recieiving mail and where from.

“In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing,” Cerf added.

Cerf further explained that privacy is not an inherent part of our society, and may have been brought about by the industrial revolution.

If you look back through history, there is proof that people do not care much for privacy. Houses do not have dividers for rooms, a family shares a large bed even with guests, and in ancient Rome, bathrooms were public.  Even those of high stature did their business in public, discussing life, politics, and philosophies while relieving themselves in front of others doing the same.  In Japan, women and men share hot baths in public.

And if you’ve ever seen TV shows today based in medieval times, you’d see that acts we consider private today were once done in public or with an audience, such as consummating a marriage, giving birth, and even dying.

What brought about this statement from Cerf is the increasing animosity towards Google’s ad targeting policy and invasive products like Google Glass, which many consider to be encroaching on people’s privacy. That may be true, but Cerf argued that as more people engage in social networking services, privacy becomes virtually non-existent.

Even if you limit your photo sharing, your friends and relatives can still upload photos of you onto such website.  And even if you untag yourself from these photos, the photo is still available for others to view, making you a public entity.  And data scientists can easily solve the puzzle of identifying who you are based on your internet activity, your social activity, and posts submitted by your friends that pertain to you.

“The technology that we use today has far outraced our social intuition, our headlights. … [There’s a] need to develop social conventions that are more respectful of people’s privacy.”

“We are gonna live through situations where some people get embarrassed, some people end up going to jail, some other people have other problems as a consequence of some of these experiences,” Cerf said. More respectful privacy conventions will likely develop as we move forward, he says, but for now, “This is something we’re gonna have to live through. I don’t think it’s easy to dictate this.”

So is Cerf suggesting that we forget about privacy?

“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be interested in privacy, but I am suggesting to you that it’s an accident, in some respect, of the urban revolution,” concludes Cerf.

Sources: The Verge, TechCrunch, SocialTimes