before the house The Energy and Commerce Committee even wrapped up its hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew last week. users took the application for mock members of Congress for their questions. Lawmakers were criticized for being unaware of the realities of social media. A younger TikTokker called audiences “the most boomer I’ve ever seen.”
But the TikTok controversy cannot simply be attributed to generational differences, as the very notion of data privacy does not stem from the invention of social media, the internet, or even computers. Instead, it dates back to a landmark legal decision in 1849, when England’s Prince Albert sued a printer for trying to publish a catalog of drawings he and Queen Victoria had made depicting their personal family life. All of the elements at stake in today’s data privacy debates—personal information, technological innovation, and national security—were also an integral part of that case.
As someone who studies the history of technology, I believe that understanding this history of data privacy can help unravel the personal and national security interests that are conflating in the ongoing debate about whether TikTok is a threat to Americans and as. When lawmakers link national problems to personal privacy concerns that they have done little to address, they play on voters’ fears about their own information without really assuaging them.
The 1849 ruling in favor of Prince Albert laid the foundation for thinking of data as both personal and national, rather than just one or the other. In the case, Albert was not only representing himself but also the monarch, Queen Victoria. The catalog in question included descriptions of prints showing the royal children in the nursery, their friends and their dogs along with comments and criticism. (The sketches themselves had already been declared private property in a separate case.) In other words, he turned the private life of the royal couple into information and put it up for sale.
This turned out to be a foundational case on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1890, American privacy laws were set citing this 1849 case, arguing that even celebrities have a “right of personality.” By banning the catalogue, the 1849 case affirmed personal privacy and defined it primarily through family life. Because the prints were for Albert and Victoria’s.”private use and pleasure”, sharing data about them would strip them of their right to domestic privacy. By 1849, monarchies had collapsed across Europe, and England’s was also tottering. When a judge ruled that the “private life of the royal family forms its unquestionable title,” he defined his sovereignty through its domestic life, not apart from it. Thus, this case set a precedent of implying national security through the rhetoric of private protection. But bringing personal privacy to the fore in this way is unethical unless backed by a policy to ensure those rights are protected.
With this in mind, we can see more clearly how the TikTok regulations currently under discussion frame national data privacy in terms of personal privacy. The notion that the Chinese government could to spy either blackmail key government employees through their TikTok activity and tampering with users’ personal content are matters of national security. But the way officials talk about them highlights individual privacy online, the “private use and pleasure” of the Internet.