Stop Saying Privacy Is Dead
The "privacy is dead" myth is killing your product. Here's what 10,000 years of human history can teach you about user trust.
As a product leader, you live and breathe user metrics. Engagement, conversion, retention, churn—we build dashboards to track it all. But what's the one metric you can't easily quantify? Trust. And at the heart of user trust is privacy. We can’t A/B test for the subtle, sinking feeling a person gets when they realize a platform knows a little too much about them, but we definitely see the results in our churn rates and abandoned carts.
I learned this lesson long before I ever heard of a product roadmap. When I was ten, my sister found and read my journal. It was a flimsy thing with a tiny, useless lock, but to me, it was a vault. The rage and violation I felt weren’t just about my embarrassing secrets; it was a breach of trust. She had crossed an invisible line. She had broken the user agreement of our sibling relationship. That feeling—that deep need for a protected space—is something we’re all engineering around, whether we realize it or not.
In our world, it’s tempting and common to dismiss this. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a colleague declare, "Privacy is dead." The argument is seductive: in a world of endless data streams, the battle is over, and exposure has won. But this is a dangerous miscalculation. To build products people will trust and love, we have to understand that our users' need for privacy isn’t a recent fad. It’s an ancient, powerful instinct. To understand the user psychology we're designing for today, we have to go back to the beginning.
The Invisible Walls of the Hunter-Gatherer
Let’s travel back in time, long before houses, cities, or even farms. Picture the life of a hunter-gatherer band. It’s an existence that seems, on its face, to be the antithesis of privacy. Life is lived out in the open, in communal camps where survival depends on radical cooperation and sharing. Food, tools, and information are widely shared because the group’s success is paramount. There are no doors to lock, no walls to hide behind. It’s the original open-plan office, but for your entire life.
Based on this, it would be easy to conclude these societies had no concept of privacy. But that’s where we get it wrong, because we’re stuck on our modern definition of privacy as physical seclusion. Anthropologists have found something much more nuanced. In these intensely communal societies, privacy wasn’t a physical state but a social practice, regulated by custom and etiquette.
Imagine living in an Icelandic longhouse or a cliff dwelling in the American Southwest. You are constantly surrounded by people. You can hear every conversation, see every family squabble. Yet, the culture demanded that you act as if "invisible walls" existed between you and your neighbors. You learned to mind your own business, to pretend not to see or hear things not meant for you. This wasn't about being alone; it was about granting others the dignity of their own space, even when no physical space existed. It was a form of "imagined privacy," created and maintained by collective discipline. There’s even a historical account of a Native American community banishing a man for being a "window peeper," a clear violation of these unwritten boundaries.
This wasn’t a free-for-all. These societies had their own form of surveillance, a way of keeping everyone in check. They practiced what anthropologists call "reverse dominance," where the group actively policed its members to prevent anyone from getting too powerful or selfish. If a hunter got arrogant about his skills, the group would mock the kill, "insulting the meat" to "cool his heart and make him gentle". This constant observation of behavior we’d now call private was essential for social cohesion. So, there was this fascinating tension: a deep communalism that limited individual autonomy, but also a sophisticated social etiquette that created pockets of privacy in plain sight.
The Revolution of 'Mine'
For tens of thousands of years, this was the human experience. But then, about 12,000 years ago, everything changed. We started farming. The Neolithic Revolution wasn't just about switching from foraging to planting; it was arguably the single most important turning point in the early history of privacy.
When you’re a nomad, your resources are shared and spread across a territory. But when you invest your labor into a specific plot of land, when you build a permanent home and a silo to store your grain, a powerful new concept emerges: "mine". For the first time, humans had fixed, valuable, and defensible assets. And with that, the idea of possession-based private property was born.
Archaeologists have found evidence of this shift in the very structure of early farming settlements. They see private storage pits and garden plots owned by families. They see a new and profound practice: burying ancestors under the floor of a specific house, a powerful statement that "this domestic residence belongs to us". The idea of a private life is almost impossible without this foundational concept of a private, defensible domain. Agriculture literally built the first walls—both physical and conceptual—that created a space for the family unit, separate from the wider community.
But here’s the paradox: the very thing that created the potential for privacy also created new pressures against it. Agriculture allowed for bigger, denser populations. Suddenly, you had neighbors in a way nomadic bands never did. This proximity made informal surveillance easier and social control more intense. And with property came the need to control its inheritance. This led to a new, unprecedented focus on paternity, which in turn led to the rise of patriarchal systems where men's control over women's sexuality was central to the new economic order. Practices like veiling and seclusion emerged as ways to guarantee lineage for the transfer of property. This was a form of enforced privacy, imposed for social and economic control rather than individual autonomy.
The Power of a Secret
Before writing became widespread, information was a living thing. It existed in people's minds and was transmitted through the powerful technologies of speech and silence. In these oral cultures, controlling the flow of knowledge was the primary way of managing privacy.
History, laws, and cultural values were all entrusted to human memory, preserved through sophisticated mnemonic systems like rhythm, repetition, and storytelling. A West African griot, for example, wasn’t just a storyteller; they were a "walking library," the living keeper of a community's entire history and legal precedent. Their role was to preserve and perform this knowledge, making them a powerful gatekeeper of information.
But spoken language is a leaky vessel for secrets. An utterance is tied to its context—tone, expression, situation—all of which can be lost or twisted when repeated. This inherent publicity of speech placed a huge cultural value on discretion. Ancient texts from India, like the
Hitopadesha, give explicit advice that certain matters—family affairs, worship, state counsel—should be kept secret. Another text warns that a secret is breached the moment it reaches "six ears"—that is, is known by more than two people—highlighting that the only reliable method for privacy was strict self-censorship.
In a world without writing, a secret couldn't be locked in a box or sealed in a letter. The only container was the silence of those who held it. Your memory and your voice were the fundamental tools of privacy and power.
This ancient, instinctual drive for privacy is the invisible architecture of our users' minds. But it's only half the story. The world of imagined boundaries and shared silence is a far cry from the one we live in. To understand the privacy settings we design and the user expectations we face today, we need to look at the moment when privacy was literally built into the world with bricks and mortar, and written down on paper.
In the next article, we’ll leap forward to the Industrial Revolution, an era that didn’t just change how we work, but forged the very concepts of 'public' and 'private' life that are now being tested to their limits in the digital age.