UC Berkeley Sociology Alumnus Martin Eiermann recently published a new book that explores the evolution of privacy, spanning from its emergence as a social norm about domestic life to its endangerment in a world of mass surveillance. It’s titled “The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue.”
The book maps out the unequal politics of personal data amid a spike in immigration raids. He based it on his award-winning Berkeley sociology dissertation, which focuses on the emergency of privacy as a political logic.
Eiermann spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences about his Cal experiences and his new book. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Can you tell us about your background and how you ended up at UC Berkeley?
Martin Eiermann: I grew up in Germany's Rhine Valley and ended up as an undergraduate at Harvard. The ability to immerse myself in that intellectual environment was absolutely transformative: What a privilege it was to be around peers and professors who were serious about serious thinking!
Sociology had always felt like a natural home, since the discipline is uniquely receptive to different modes of inquiry and also attuned to the real problems of the world. This can sometimes be disorienting but also encourages creative, ambitious and relevant research. When I applied to graduate school, Berkeley had a well-earned reputation as the premier department where junior scholars were encouraged to pursue that kind of research – so that's where I wanted to be.
Can you tell us about your experience with Sociology at UC Berkeley?
Martin Eiermann: As a grad student in the social sciences, I was expected to pursue independent research, venture into archives across the United States, and eventually return home with the fruits of my harvest. This method doesn't work for everyone, but it allowed me to pursue ambitious research that would not have been possible in most other departments.
I was also fortunate to find a group of mentors at UC Berkeley – Sociology professors Mara Loveman and Marion Fourcade; Law Professor Jonathan Simon; and Demography Professor Dennis Feehan – who really helped me to grow as a social scientist. I also got to teach for several semesters for the late, great Michael Burawoy, a renowned Berkeley sociology professor. He was simply incredible at encouraging students to develop confidence in their own abilities and skills.
Tell us about your book, “The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue.”
Martin Eiermann: The logic of privacy is now used to moderate a wide range of debates about emerging technologies and the rights of citizens and consumers. At the same time, privacy is often seen as effectively dead. In the context of an information economy, a data-hungry American state, and the deployment of generative AI, it's easy to conclude that we've sleepwalked into a world of without privacy. I think this conclusion overstates both the ubiquity and the newness of contemporary surveillance systems. But my book is an attempt to understand how we have ended up in the world we now inhabit, among all possible worlds.
To do this, I trace the evolution of privacy from a narrow social norm about domestic life into a powerful limiting principle of American politics and society. The events which took place between 1880 and 1930 are important for understanding that shift. They cemented some of the basic features of privacy governance in the United States, such as the breadth of privacy claims in politics and public life and the coupling of privacy and public morals.
How does the focus of your book on the early Information Age inform our understanding of the world we live in now?
Martin Eiermann: Although the techno-social realities of the present appear unprecedented, we can learn about the present by looking at the past – not because history repeats itself (it does not), but because it allows us to see things that might otherwise be obscured by forces of habit and makes it possible to identify historical turning points.
Today, the logic of privacy underpins a huge range of political debates. Against the backdrop of history, I worry that we’ve burdened the concept of privacy with so much weight that it might buckle under the load. I think there's a real possibility that we're inching back towards a 19th century understanding of privacy that primarily structures peer-to-peer relations, rather than relations between individuals and powerful institutions. That’s one of the present conundrums: institutions that know a lot about our personal lives are able to comply with the letter of the law without offering informational privacy in a more substantive sense.
Another conundrum is that different people experience the Information Age very differently and suffer different consequences when their data is collected and analyzed. For example, personal data is often essential to the targeting of marginalized populations. That’s one reason why the current administration has focused on facilitating data-sharing between the IRS, ICE, or Social Security Administration (SSA), with the specific aim of identifying undocumented immigrants. Rather than asserting the ubiquity of surveillance, it is therefore better to ask: What grievances, values or ideologies motivate public demands for privacy? How is the scope of privacy protections reshaped by political conflict? And who benefits?
What impact do you hope your book will have?
Martin Eiermann: When I was a little boy in rural Germany, a sign in a neighbor’s front yard proudly proclaimed that “the Good Lord knows everything, but the neighborhood knows more.” But I've also spent much of my adulthood in American cities and in the shadow of Silicon Valley, learning about the complex interactions between the individual and the community in this country and about the unique American approach to privacy and personal data. On a purely personal note, this book was partly an attempt to understand my adopted home.
Of course I hope that others will also find the book useful, interesting and pertinent. It’s easy to assume that privacy implies a rejection of social interactions, but I want to convey the myriad ways in which privacy norms are products of social life and directly shaped by our collective hopes and fears about an uncertain future. I also lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than a decade and was often taken aback by the mismatch between high enthusiasm for technological disruption and a concurrent disinterest in the social consequences of that disruption. I hope that people who read this book will ultimately agree that the politics of personal data and personal space have real consequences for the organization and functioning of society.