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I'd rather formulate that as privacy is a fundamental concept, but its legal implementation is reactionary.

• dredmorbius 5y ago
  That's similar in notion. Privacy is inherent in a nontechnical world, and created a set of practices and expectations generally. Yes, there could be an immediate intrusion by those sharing the same place and time, but improvements in information technology created an ever-growing set of methods to violate privacy remote in space, remote in time, and pervasive in both what it could perceive and record. If you look at how expanded notions of privacy developed, largely beginning in the 19th century (though with obvious precursors, see the US Bill of Rights and some earlier legal protections), those emerged in response to specific technological threats: printing and publishing, photography, telephony, improved optical sensing, recording, and increasingly over the past half century, digital monitoring, data storage, and analytic tools. There's a substantial if fractured literature on this, much of which begins by observing that there's no generally-agreed-on definition of privacy. "An emergent response" is my contribution to that. Warren & Brandeis, Solove, Nissenbaum, and Lepore are amongst the authors I've found useful.