Do you really need to know what Freud had for breakfast?

A common topic of discussion in several of our classes this year has been privacy. To what extent should we consider the privacy of historical figures? Archival repositories have been struggling with these issues for years. Families of deceased persons whose personal papers are bequeathed to an archive may wish to control access to certain documents and thus, the data that they may contain. For example, when Sigmund Freud’s papers were deposited at the Library of Congress, many of them were sealed for decades, with restrictions imposed until, in one case, 2113. While most of these documents have now been made public, some restrictions still exist, seventy years after his death. The reason for this was the concern of his daughter, and the psychoanalyst who was in charge of the Freud Archive, that he might be exposed to unfair criticism. But of course, no-one can actually own a reputation. [1] Information is information, and should be made available to the public as much as possible – right?

In our current, digital age, the issue of privacy becomes much more pressing. At least Freud could control what records he left behind, even if he cannot control who sees them from beyond the grave. The documents he left behind are of a conventional nature – things like letters and diaries that he actively and knowingly created. But we now live in a world where it is possible that we are leaving behind a trail of evidence of which we are not even aware.

In a previous post, I discussed spimes and possibility of a future in which all objects are connected in a sort of wireless network, so that their own personal history is recorded. The issue of privacy comes in when the objects you buy in the store are imbedded with chips that allow them to be tracked once you take them home. So it’s not just about the record you leave through email and telephone conversations, or through your diary and handwritten letters like Freud. Now it’s about what you buy and what you do with your possessions. The technology to imbed objects with small microchips and monitor its location already exists. It’s called radio frequency identification – or RFiD – and has been around since the Second World War. But in the past few years its potential implications have become more apparent and have been cause for concern, even alarm, among some. In a world that is increasingly monitored, where we are ever more frequently under the scrutiny of surveillance cameras, doesn’t this seem like the next logical step?

This technology could certainly have interesting implications for studying history, as I intimated in my previous post. But the already complicated issue of privacy just gets even stickier. Just as Freud’s daughter didn’t want the less flattering elements of her father’s records to come to light, who would really be ok with the world knowing their every purchase after they died? Aren’t some things, after all, better left unknown?

1. Joseph L. Sax, “Not so Public: Access to Collections”, RBM:A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage vol. 1 no.2, 101-105