Privacy — and protecting it — will be a great issue for this century

PERFECT transparency, like a bird flying into a glass building, is the state of being able to see nothing.

All the more surprising then the furore over the mass electronic surveillance of personal data by the United States and probably many others. Even more astonishing is the surprise that dozens of European leaders including Angela Merkel had their personal phones tapped. This is the age we live in; it’s not surprising. It may, however, be toxic.

What we now regard as personal privacy is a remarkably recent development. It has its origins in the eighteenth century, an emerging sense of the individual self, separate from the greater community and consequently enjoying greater individual rights too. It came of age in the bourgeois Victorian era of the nineteenth century. In architecture, a fashion for rooms opening off corridors and not directly opening one into another, as before, delineated private spaces that could not be intruded on except by permission or invitation.