The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America

by Jeffrey Rosen

The Unwanted Gaze is an important book about one of the most pressing issues of our day: how changes in technology and the law have combined to demolish our rights of privacy, and what we can and must do to re-secure them.

In a world in which Ken Starr can subpoena Monica Lewinsky's bookstore receipts and deleted e-mail messages can be used as justification for firing employees, it's clear that private information of all kinds can be taken out of context and wielded against us. Where exactly did our constitutional guarantees on privacy go? In superbly lucid prose, Jeffrey Rosen tells not only where those privacy rights went but also how we can get them back. The Unwanted Gaze is utterly indispensable for anyone who cares about the future of his or her private life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Law, History

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Rama · Rating 2 out of 5]

“A liberal state respects the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts parts of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom.”

2.5/5- Another conflicting read. While I loved it in theory, the direction the author takes is not one I was expecting, and did not prove to be a welcome detour. We open with the case of Monica Lewinsky, who, as a result of her affair with former president of the United States, has her personal information revealed to the general public. In the digital age, her footprint across platforms she hadn’t even considered such as online journal drafts, deleted messages to friends, and store receipts, becomes exposed for all to see and condemn. How did America go from respecting privacy of even the most condemned of criminals to openly exposing the unnecessary details of an ordinary citizen? This book sets out to explore how the law has shifted to include the ability to breach privacies at work, at home, and in any public environments where privacy “should no longer be expected or reasonably achieved”.

It compares our modern day to a pre-internet era, and discusses, at length, the implications this will have on harassement law and what we consider libel. This is what I was expecting to carry on reading, but was instead faced mostly with sexual harassement cases where the author treads carefully to make the argument that they are not a gender issue, but instead a privacy issue. An interesting take- controversial yet well-supported- but not what was advertised as the content of the work. I felt it to be a lengthy discussion that did not provide more insight and was therefore largely unnecessary. I would be interested, however, in reading other books by this author that conform more closely to their prescribed genres/themes, and will be looking for more books on privacy and it’s progression through the ages, so if for nothing else, I am grateful for the introduction to the topic. Recommendations welcome!

[Alexander McEvoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosen's The Unwanted Gaze, published originally in 2000, gives contemporary readers the unique insight into what was meant by Privacy in an era before social media and smartphones. In this era, fresh off the Clinton impeachment scandal, Rosen focuses on the realm of Privacy as it relates to the courts and systems of State power.

Rosen spends much of the book outlining how the expansion of sexual harassment law has resulted in the erosion of privacy by the hands of vast powers of evidentiary discovery wielded by Prosecutors and Defendants. This aspect of the book is clearly mired in the sex scandals of the 90s, but it's not totally without its merits. Our sexual habits and preferences are probably universally considered the most private aspects of our lives, so it's noteworthy that it's the area of law where evidentiary standards have encouraged carte blanche investigation into peoples' sexual histories.

But if Rosen is generally making the case that certain jurisprudential aspects of sexual harassment litigation has gone too far to violating the privacy of those involved, then the readers' mind quickly drifts to the MeToo era. This is where the datedness of Rosen's work is most clear.

While it may have become popular to say that the MeToo era overcorrected at some point, it's widely accepted that the overall impact of the movement has been positive in discouraging illegal behavior.

How should we consider the MeToo era in relation to the Clinton and Thomas scandals that Rosen relies on?

It's probably fair to say the public has become more harsh in their judgements of the two men in the post-MeToo era, suggesting the mining of their private lives would be accepted in the 2020s. Clinton's sexual abuse accusers were brought back into the spotlight by Donald Trump's campaign in 2016. (That event predates MeToo by a year, but I suggest that the public's mores didn't turn on a dime.) It's clear that Clinton's accusers were taken more seriously, especially by younger people who didn't have the visceral feeling of a partisan finger wagging from the 90s like older Democrats did.

The most visceral example of that is likely of Juanita Broaddrick who received a sympathetic profile in BuzzFeed News amidst the campaign. Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic and Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times would then reconsider Broaddrick's story post-MeToo generally admitting Broaddrick's accusations are credible.

Clarence Thomas also has an analogue in the post-MeToo era in the case of Brett Kavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault after President Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court. From there, a blistering months long political scandal that would have made Rosen of the year 2000 wince. Figures from Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford's past were dug up and asked to testify. Their private lives were mined for indications of who to believe: Kavanaugh's social calendar presented for evidence, Blasey Ford's therapist's notes, etc.

Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas' accuser, would go onto pen a Rosen-esque op-ed in the New York Times castigating the Senate Judiciary Committee for the potential of ruining witnesses' lives.

Anyway, all this to be said, if Rosen sought to galvanize support for narrower readings of sexual harassment laws for the purpose of protecting the privacy of accusers and accused, he clearly failed. Whether that failure is good or not is a separate discussion.

The last section of the book is dedicated to Privacy in Cyberspace, which at times is woefully dated and other times notably prescient. The prescient parts have to do with tracking technologies and personalized advertising.

Rosen correctly points out that tracking technologies were fairly cavalier at the time before the introduction of large consumer technology companies that would serve as storing houses for consumer data. (Meta, Google, etc.) In the pre-2004 world, invisible data brokers would track and trade consumer data to advertisers and websites. Rosen intelligently draws a comparison to a shopping mall: You may pay with cash in one store. You may peruse some books in another. You may buy a shirt in a credit card in a third. The only 'trackable' action in that shopping mall would be the credit card purchase. In the digital world, all three of those actions would be trackable.

Those trackable actions inform personalized advertising, that Rosen points out would violate one's privacy if it takes a certain action out of context. For example: I peruse a fantasy book at Barnes and Noble. Does that mean I should be inundated with ads for fantasy books and movies? My privacy is violated because I feel misidentified. That's Rosen's position, which I'm uncertain of.

In summation, Rosen wrote an interesting book that's relevance to the modern world varies. While the history of sexual harassment law and the erosion of privacy is interesting context, his moral outrage at the Thomas and Clinton scandals is woefully aged in a post-MeToo era. Further, while he clearly was able to see the future around the corner in terms of how much tracking there would be on the modern internet, it's not particularly informative in the details.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars more accurately describes my feeling.

Rosen delivers some powerful and ultimately prophetic thoughts on the future of privacy law in America. For a book that came out in 2000, and references a time when AOL and AltaVista were still kings, man did it get a lot right.

Unfortunately, the first two chapters of the book spoil this otherwise good insight. In attempting to make a case for the reclassification of some sexual harassment situations as invasion of privacy torts, Rosen manages to come across as an old white man who doesn’t understand why he can’t tell bawdy jokes at the office anymore. He clarifies sufficiently later in the work to show this is not the case, but it distracts from the points he tries to make. I found the first two chapters mostly ineffective, and I believe he struggled to find a way to present the arguments without coming across as they ultimately did.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think he missed the mark on this one. The book really only looks at privacy as it relates to sex or sexual harassment. But there are so many aspects of that should have been explored. I felt this book was a waste of my time :(

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe the Rosen's observations of our willingness to sacrifice privacy - albeit implicitly - for accessibility and a sense of connectedness which the internet and social media brings to us, might be even MORE critical and pertinent and even LESS understood and appreciated by us, the consumers, today than during the period this book was written; fascinating given the role of the internet in that time compared to now.

Imagine with me now, you post a picture on social media of you doing anything, anything at all could be a trip, one of your hobbies, your favorite restaurant, and perhaps featuring any of your friends or frequented locations. Imagine if someone really really wanted to, how plainly easy it would be for someone to conduct a massive con on you, or worse cause you physical harm, using the bread trail of metadata we've exposed to the internet. Naturally, this is NOT a threat most of us deal with on the day to day (but think about it, kinda the point, when would you ever know!). But let me make an assertion on this topic; I'm sayin if we genuinely valued our privacy - whether consciously or not - to some degree more than or equally to the functionality and convenience of internet and social media, I posit we would consider a lot more carefully and act more reserved when we overtly dox ourselves all the time with our full names, locations, social circle, likes & interests, personal relationships... take your pick! Think about it, if we really valued our privacy the way we might profess to our friends and on our social medias when a situation like the Cambridge Analytica scandal comes about, we'd at least have the sense of urgency and importance to confront it and discuses & decide among ourselves at a time when such a dire news story like such ISN'T the impetus of the conversation!

So let's talk about the extremes of the spectrum - perhaps we could all live "off the grid"! (like Ron Swanson throwing out his computer in the dumpster after finding his home address on Google maps). Surely we can all understand how to navigate the balancing act to find what works best for each of us - I'm ALWAYS going to sacrifice some amount of privacy in order to conduct my life, in today's age how else I going to interact with my friends, news, sports, my career, without my WILLING forfeiture of at least SOME of my personal demographics and information? Yes indeed, some degree of insecurity is an inevitability, but the responsibility is on each of us to decide where we delineate our prerogatives. How about the polar opposite - "well, if I let Google Ads have FULL access to my life: my shopping history, my direct messages, my GPS locations, my biometrics even... I mean phew! Think how personalized it can shape my shopping experience!". Welp, sure thing - that would be pretty neat BUT, I think many of us could see the inconvenience and overt danger of having all the data imaginable of my family, daily schedule, and sensitive personal data exposed to a third-party system.

For most of us out there on the internet, we chart some middle path but I'd venture to guess many of us have this unspoken blind spot; we have this implicit expectation of "privacy", but it's really an abridged version of privacy, one which requires we concede our personal info and metadata, and in return we enjoy a level of accessibility and connectedness of the internet and its services, which we enjoy at a level that must compensate the price of privacy and security we've just "paid" to have it.

So to return to the question I think we all need to be consistently asking ourselves - not just when there's a breaking news story, but as a habitual practice of information security; "what level of privacy am I willing to sacrifice, in return for the services and amenities I can use from relinquishing it?". To me this is a fascinating topic of discussion, and one that invites not only introspection to the manners in which we conduct our own lives, but how we can pick, manage, or create entirely new systems to best suite our needs in a world that depends so heavily on the internet and connected systems to sustain our most critical infrastructure, and our most mundane as well as leisurely tasks.

TL;DR, eh it not bad!

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is for the Kindle edition of the work, which for whatever reason, wasn't an option on Goodreads.

With The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, Jeffrey Rosen presents a thought-provoking, if somewhat controversial, argument about the loss of personal privacy in America today, a development he criticizes on legal, sociological, ethical, and political grounds. One part history, one part polemic, The Unwanted Gaze encapsulates a view of privacy that goes far beyond what the average American could or would verbalize, although many may understand it on an intuitive level. In effect, privacy for the author is the right of the individual to decide for himself or herself what types of information will be available to which audience, whether it be the public generally, our employers, our friends, or our closest intimates. Rosen rejects the assertion that by disclosing information in one context that we forfeit the right (be it moral, ethical, legal or otherwise) to insist upon it remaining private in another.

Divided into five chapters in addition to a Preface and an Epilogue, Rosen begins with a discussion of the courts' rejection of the "mere evidence" rule that traditionally barred the search and seizure of an individual's private papers and effects unless the property seized was an instrumentality of a crime, the results of a crime, or contraband. Mere evidence of a crime, such a diary or log, were exempt from search or seizure. This traditional rule was eventually disregarded and rejected by modern courts as increased focus came to be made on white collar crimes following World War II and the New Deal, where the only evidence of violations often took the form of papers and effects. While Rosen is correct that the mere evidence rule was generally accepted, a review of various cases decided by courts prior to the formal rejection of the mere evidence rule reveals that courts often found ways around the general prohibition via expansive definitions of its exceptions. Thus, it is arguable whether the mere evidence rule really provided any great protection of privacy. Beginning in Chapter 2 and continuing at various points throughout the work, the author spends a great deal of his time critiquing the state of sexual harassment law in America. To summarize, Rosen feels that sexual harassment lawsuits often involve mere insults to dignity better addressed by law, if at all, in the form of the intrusion of seclusion tort as a type of invasion of privacy civil action. Furthermore, Rosen objects to the required invitation to claimants to breach the bounds of personal privacy in an attempt to establish a pattern of conduct sufficient to arise to hostile work environment, as well as the practice of holding employers liable for the actions of its employees absent clear proof of negligence or wrongdoing by the employer. This last point is particularly troubling to the author because this expansion of liability drives employers to utilize increasingly invasive forms of surveillance of employees in the name of preventing costly litigation. The discussion of sexual harassment law is interspersed with lengthy discussions about the impact of technology, specifically the internet and the accumulation of personally identifiable information for marketing purposes, on our actual and ideal conceptions of privacy.

While the work is at times somewhat dry and repetitive (see for example the author's repetitive use of the phrase "out of context" to explain the dangers of public revelations of private information) and I would like an opportunity to discuss with the author some of the limits and implications of his arguments, I would recommend this work to anyone interested in privacy or sexual harassment law, especially in light of the rise of social networking platforms and the increasing reliance upon information shared in this manner to justify or explain retaliatory actions taken by employers, organizations, and individuals.

[David Wake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really interesting theoretical commentary about privacy and the history of privacy law in the US. But also quite a bit of the book was dedicated to discussing Privacy through the lens of sexual harassment law, which was less interesting.

[Malynda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another one for the unfinished business shelf. I pretty much knew that I wouldn't finish it when I could hardly get through the prologue. This one might be a donation to the library. It felt like something I would have to write a paper on in college.

[John]

nonfiction,information science

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slightly out of date and a little politically naive but best appreciated as a history of privacy law in America.

[Subdee · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://subdee.tumblr.com/post/612875...