American Privacy Assignment | Top Universities

Frederick Lane’s American Privacy is insightful, informative, and imminently readable. After a relatively brief introduction discussing some modern issues relating to privacy, Mr. Lane’s book follows a primarily chronologically the development of the concept of personal privacy in America from the Colonial Era, through the American Revolution, the Industrial Age, the Civil War, the World Wars, the Cold War and the then-current War on Terror.

Within this mostly chronological framework, the author as constructed thematically-linked chapters and sub-chapters that examine the issue of privacy in various contexts. Of particular interest for me was his discussion of the early development of the U.S. Postal Service and its attendant privacy-related concerns, the examination of the census process throughout U.S. history as a microcosm of the governmental desire to accumulate data about citizens, and his discussion of the rise of consumer credit use that occasioned ever-greater intrusion by corporations into the personal lives of Americans. Despite Mr. Lane’s tendency to attack with great vigor the Bush Administration’s “attack” on personal privacy following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, overall the work avoids a sense of righteous anger and/or preaching so that the facts, as they were, may stand on their own and be judged by the reader according to his or her own beliefs regarding privacy. The last chapter of the book contains Mr. Lane’s own personal prescription for the best ways to preserve privacy in the America in the 21st Century, including a call for the establishing of a governmental enforcement agency tasked with developing, proposing, enforcing and educating American governmental agencies, corporations and citizens about the need and benefits of privacy protections. Get English homework help today