ABSTRACT
In western societies privacy is at a premium. It is what people want and expect governments to provide. Historically that is strange since originally ‘privacy’ (in Latin privatio) meant ‘deprivation’, or more simply, ‘privation’. Thus the sense of the predicate ‘private’ is originally that of having had something significant taken away. This would be the more obvious if the accent were put on the second syllable. For the Romans, privacy or being private straightforwardly meant being out of public office, or not yet in it. As Dewey notes, ‘etymologically “private” is defined in opposition to “official” ’, and he adds, ‘a private person being one deprived of public position’.1
