One of the architects of the modern internet, Vint Cerf, went on to become Google’s chief internet evangelist from October 2005 through to July 2026, making several key predictions on the technologies he played a role in crafting. But, casting his eye back, he also once made a staggering admission about his view on privacy.
“Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is something which has emerged out of the urban boom coming from the industrial revolution… It will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy. Our social behavior is quite damaging to privacy. Technology has outraced our social intellect.”
The need for privacy
Cerf was speaking during a media Q&A session at a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) workshop on the Internet of Things (IoT) when he made these off-the-cuff remarks.
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There’s no single official source of truth on the exact words he uttered, but The Verge reconstructed his words as best they could, with Cerf essentially highlighting that throughout the span of human existence, our desire for privacy is, relatively, a modern blip.
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The comments may be perceived as a means of undermining what’s become an aggressive desire for privacy, especially in the wake of revelations on government surveillance and a reliance on using personal data in the business models of companies like Google. But Cerf cast his eye much further and wider, cutting to human nature itself.
Human nature
Cerf saw people as being naturally inclined to living in much smaller communities, like villages, in which only a few thousand people would ever interact.
There, he said, everybody would know what everybody else was doing, and the postmaster would know who everyone was getting their mail from, as he put it.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there’s been a massive growth in much larger population centres like cities, with the global population also massively exploding.
But there’s also an argument to make that times move on, and our nature has shifted to adapt to the world we know, not the world in which our ancestors inhabited. By that nature, our need for privacy is still innate, with big tech companies like Google seeking to undermine this by exploiting our personal data for private gain.
