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Maybe someday
25
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
12/100Critics
37/100Scholars
Author:
Amy Gajda
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
April 12, 2022
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. Seek and Hide carries us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law alÂlows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today's full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet had erased the right to privacy completely.
What The Reviewers Say
Wry and fascinating.
Amy Gajda links our present struggle to an underappreciated tradition in American law and thought.
Gajda, who is a deft storyteller, recounts the machinations of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Grover Cleveland, among many others, to keep their private lives out of the press..
[A] stimulating, thoughtful work.
