Greta Garbo is best known throughout her storied career for her plea from the 1932 film Grand Hotel. She later left the spotlight and chose to live the rest of her life privately and anonymously – an exit considered freakish by the public and a press which shadowed her the rest of her life. Today, we know far more about everyday citizens who’s allure falls far short of Garbo’s. Hundreds of millions share photos, videos, opinions, and other details of their intimate lives online…meanwhile, our personal spending habits, web searches, communications and possibly even DNA can be monitored, analyzed and sold without our knowledge. In the book Privacy, the latest entry in Picador’s big ideas/small books, series, writer Garret Keizer goes beyond the technological and legalistic conversations about privacy to consider the moral, social and economic dimensions of privacy.
The famous Greta Garbo scene:
