A private life.
A world that keeps a copy.

015th century BCEA classical account

The tablet looked empty.

Herodotus tells a story about a warning that needed to travel without looking like a warning. Demaratus, living in Persia, wanted to tell Sparta about Xerxes's preparations for war. He scraped the wax from a writing tablet, wrote on the wood underneath, then covered the words with wax again.

The tablet arrived apparently blank. Gorgo suggested removing the wax. There was the message. Herodotus presents this as a story he had been told; we have his account, rather than independent proof of the journey. Read the passage in the Histories, 7.239.

I like the very ordinary distinction inside this extraordinary story. Someone was meant to read the words. Just not everyone who handled the object. Concealing the writing changed who could easily see it; the writing itself was still there.

02c. 8 CEA myth, told by Ovid

Even the reeds had something to say.

In Ovid's telling, King Midas hides his donkey's ears. The servant who cuts his hair discovers the secret and cannot bear to keep it entirely to himself. So he digs a hole, whispers into it, and covers it with earth.

It seems like a reasonably private place to put a sentence. Then reeds grow above it. When the wind moves through them, they repeat what he said. Ovid tells it in Book XI of the Metamorphoses.

The useful part, for me, is the extra carrier. The secret leaves the person who knew it and takes on a life he never intended. A family photograph can do something much more mundane: leave a private chat, become somebody's profile picture, then turn up in a screenshot of that profile. Nobody needed to plan the whole journey.

031531–1697Books and surviving letters

Ordinary life had reasons to stay private.

In 1531, Andrea Alciato's Emblematum liber helped establish the printed emblem book: a small image, a motto and explanatory verse working together to make a point. These books could be moral, political, religious or simply puzzling. They taught readers to look for an argument inside a scene. The University of Glasgow introduces the first edition.

Meanwhile, a letter could be folded into its own enclosure. Tucks, slits, seals and paper locks made it harder to open casually. Some arrangements left damage that the recipient could notice. The final letter of Mary, Queen of Scots, written on 8 February 1587, preserves one particularly elaborate example. The National Library of Scotland explains its folds.

But this wasn't only a royal concern. On 31 July 1697, Jacques Sennacques wrote to a cousin asking for a certified death notice. His carefully closed letter never reached its destination. It survived among undelivered mail in the Brienne Collection. I find the paperwork quite reassuring. A life doesn't need to contain a great scandal to deserve a private letter. The surviving letter and its contents.

041749–1791Imaginary spaces and a proposal

You cannot tell whether someone is watching.

Around 1749–50, Giovanni Battista Piranesi published the first version of his Imaginary Prisons. He later reworked the plates and expanded the series in 1761. Stairs, bridges and enormous interiors leave the people inside them looking very small. These are invented spaces, with meanings people still debate. Museum Boijmans compares the editions.

A few decades later, Jeremy Bentham developed the Panopticon proposal around a central inspection idea from his brother Samuel. The arrangement would let an inspector observe people who could not reliably tell whether they were being watched. The letters describing it were written in 1787 and published in 1791. UCL explains the mechanism; the original edition records the dates.

The uncertainty was meant to do some of the work. A person who cannot tell when they are watched may start organising their behaviour around the possibility. That gives privacy a consequence beyond whether a particular secret gets out: room to act without continually imagining an observer.

051888–1890A camera and an argument

The camera leaves the studio.

In 1888, a Kodak camera came loaded for one hundred pictures. After using the roll, its owner could send the whole camera away for developing and reloading. The photograph was becoming something more people could make without arranging a studio sitting. See the original Kodak at the Smithsonian.

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published The Right to Privacy. They wrote about quick photographs, newspaper intrusion and the circulation of portraits without permission. Kodak belongs to the technological setting; it would be too neat to say that one camera caused the essay. Read their argument in the Brandeis collection.

The question still fits a family day out. You can be happy to spend an afternoon among other people and still object to a photograph being published to an audience you never chose. Being present and agreeing to publication are different decisions. The law around those decisions depends on where you are; the conversation can often start before the shutter.

061948An international declaration

The home and the letter are worth naming.

On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 12 names privacy, family, home and correspondence, and calls for protection against arbitrary interference. It also addresses attacks on honour and reputation. Read Article 12 in the declaration.

It is striking how ordinary those things are. The room you live in. The people close to you. The letter meant for one person. A boundary around them gives people somewhere to live without having to explain every part of that life to an audience.

The declaration did not instantly give everyone the same enforceable rights. It set out a standard whose protection still depends on laws, institutions and what people actually do. The Australian Human Rights Commission explains the declaration's legal status.

071989–1992Citizens preserve the records

This time, the files needed to survive.

On 4 December 1989, women activists took the initiative in Erfurt as citizens entered Stasi offices and stopped the destruction of records. The Stasi was East Germany's secret police. Protesters occupied its Berlin headquarters on 15 January 1990. Germany's Federal Archives recounts the events in Erfurt and the occupation in Berlin.

Roughly sixteen thousand bags of papers torn up by hand survived. Archivists have worked to reconstruct them. Regular access to people's own files began in January 1992. Preserving the evidence helped people find out what had been collected about them. The reconstruction project and the archive's account of access explain what happened next.

This complicates a comforting rule: just delete the information. Sometimes deletion protects the person described. Sometimes it protects the person who did the watching. Who controls the record, who can inspect it, and who can challenge what it says all matter.

081993 onwardThe networked photograph

The picture no longer needs the room.

On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. It was an extraordinary decision for sharing knowledge. A system first developed to connect scientific information could grow far beyond the place where it began. CERN tells the story.

The web is not the beginning of digital copying. It belongs here because publishing and linking make the picture's journey easier to follow, and harder for its owner to contain. A photograph can live on one website while a search result points to it from another. Taking away the directions does not take the photograph off the first site.

A family post can also be a video. It carries a face through many frames, with voices and surroundings travelling alongside it. The parent's job gets more specific: cover this face for the whole clip, check the sound, choose the copy to upload. 'I edited it' needs to refer to the file that actually leaves the device.

092020–2026Generation, reading and surveillance

A convincing answer can still be a guess.

In 2020, the PULSE research project demonstrated a way to turn very small face images into detailed, plausible portraits. Its researchers explicitly warned that the outputs were imaginary faces, not a way to recover the original person's identity. The sharpness of a picture was not proof of its truth. The researchers' explanation.

There is a different kind of revelation in the letter we left unopened in 1697. In 2021, researchers scanned the sealed letter with X-rays, then used software to work out how its folded surfaces fitted together. That let them read the writing without physically opening it. This required physical access and specialised equipment; an ordinary photograph of a sealed letter could not do the same job. Here, the hidden writing was actually recovered. The original research. Guessing a plausible face and reading a surviving sentence are different achievements.

Other systems organise observations. Flock says its vehicle cameras record number plates, vehicle details, times and locations, and that these plate readers do not use facial recognition. In August 2025, an Illinois audit found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had accessed Illinois plate-camera data in violation of state law. A record of a journey raises questions about access even when nobody is trying to identify a face. Flock's description; the Illinois audit announcement.

10Today · 2026Back to our family

I still want to share the afternoon.

Miriam and I built Baby Acrobatics to help parents move and play with their babies. We share that work on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. Our children appear in that work a lot. We've always obscured their faces, and we keep their names and many other life details private. We also ask photographers to leave them out.

I can want someone to see an exercise without needing them to have a clear picture of my child's face. I can send a photograph to family and ask them to keep it in the family. Neither choice makes the rest of the internet private. It gives us something specific to decide before adding another copy to it.

Our free face-covering tool helps with that part. It cannot decide who else posts a picture, hide a spoken name, or remove a journey from a camera database. The privacy guide follows those other questions too. The point is to give our children more room to decide what becomes public as they grow up.

There is a more personal part of this for me, too: how I feel about attention, energy and so many strangers seeing a child's face. I wrote an essay about that feeling and the histories it led me to. The illustration gives the feeling a scene; the essay keeps my intuition separate from what those histories can establish.