Privacy is a protean concept: its meaning changes depending on the historical and cultural context. As a seventeenth-century preacher reminded his flock: ‘The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy’ – it is not always considered a social good – but from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century, privacy had come to be thought of as a necessary space free of interference from religious and state authority and the right to retreat from public scrutiny.
By the nineteenth century, privacy was held up as a sacred value required by the modern self. As two Bostonian lawyers, Samuel Warren and John Brandeis, argued in the most famous article in privacy history, ‘The Right to Privacy’, published in the Harvard Law Review. Warren and Brandeis called for ‘a right to be let alone’, to defend the ‘sacred precincts of private and domestic life’ from the invasion of the public world. ‘The intensity of modern life, attendant upon advancing civilisation’, they lamented, ‘have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual.’ The Victorian idea of privacy was tied to the private sphere, which was close to being worshipped.
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-strange-death-of-private-life/