来源：《大西洋月刊》2022年5月号
America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was also one of its shortest-lived. Its inaugural issue, published in 1690, aired rumors of an affair between the French king and his daughter-in-law, along with other scandalous reports—and was promptly censored and confiscated by British authorities in Boston. But the American appetite for such salacious fare was irrepressible. By the time of the Civil War, journals such as The Illustrated Police News were devoted to graphic depictions of real-life criminal cases: Readers were served up vivid woodcuts of brothel raids, hangings, suicides, and child deaths—the more violent and horrific, the better.
美国的第一份报纸《国内外事件公开报》，同时也是其寿命最短的报纸之一。1690年出版的创刊号，刊登了法国国王和儿媳之间的绯闻，以及其他一些丑闻报道，很快就被波士顿的英国当局审查并没收。但是美国人对这种色情题材的胃口是无法抑制的。在南北战争时期，诸如《警察新闻画报》这样的报纸致力于对真实刑事案件的生动描述：读者们看到的是妓院突袭、绞刑、自杀和儿童死亡的生动木版画——暴力和恐怖程度越高越好。
The invasiveness of contemporary gossip sites, social media, and search engines, it turns out, has a long pedigree. Although the technologies of dissemination have changed, the impulse to portray—and profit from—intimate material has thrived for centuries.
事实证明，当代八卦网站、社交媒体和搜索引擎的入侵由来已久。尽管传播技术已经发生了变化，但几个世纪以来，人们对私密材料的描绘和获利的冲动一直在蓬勃发展。
The history of the counter-impulse—legal efforts to restrain intrusions into Americans’ private lives and affairs—is shorter. Public calls for a right to privacy emerged only at the turn of the 20th century, triggered by a more aggressive press as well as technical innovations like instantaneous photography, new communication platforms like the telegraph and the telephone, and, later, novel uses of personal information by private companies and government agencies. In response, state legislatures, the Supreme Court, and eventually Congress stepped in to patrol the boundary between the properly public and the deservedly private.
反冲动——通过法律手段限制对美国人私生活和私人事务的侵犯——的历史较短。公众对隐私权的呼吁直到20世纪初才出现，这是由更具侵略性的媒体以及即时摄影等技术创新、电报和电话等新通信平台的出现，以及后来私人公司和政府机构对个人信息的新奇使用引发的。作为回应，州立法机构、最高法院，以及最终的国会介入，在正常的公开和应得的隐私之间巡逻。