To be a politician today is to live in some ways like a citizen of North Korea . A politician must assume that he or she is under 24-hour audio-visual surveillance . Any objectionable remark , any untoward joke , any awkward facial expression may be recorded and broadcast . Professional and personal ruin can strike at any moment . If George Allen 's `` macaca '' moment did n't drive home the point , Scott Prouty 's 47 % video certainly should . But it 's not only politicians who live under perpetual surveillance . We all do ! Earlier this month , researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University detailed how Facebook systematically erodes users ' privacy wishes . `` Researchers found that during the first four years , users steadily limited what personal data was visible to strangers within their school network . Yet through changes Facebook introduced to its platform in 2009 and 2010 , the social network actually succeeded in reversing some users ' inclination to avoid public disclosure of their data . In fact , the social network 's new policies were not only able to partly override an active desire not to post personal details publicly , but they have so far kept such disclosures from sinking back to their lower levels , according to the study . They also found that even as people sought to limit what strangers could learn about them from their Facebook profiles , they actually increased what information they shared with their friends . Facebook 's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has famously said that privacy is no longer a social norm . He 's worked mightily to make those words self-fulfilling , and in tandem with other technologies ( smartphones ) and social media ( notably YouTube ) , Zuckerberg has succeeded . The demise of privacy as a social norm is leading to the demise of privacy as a legal right . Scott Prouty likely wo n't face legal sanctions for videotaping Romney . Mike Edmonson , spokesman for the Palm Beach County State Attorney , explains why not : `` For the law to be broken , the person being taped must have a reasonable expectation of privacy . '' Once upon a time , a speaker might have expected that an off-the-record , closed-door speech in a private home would be `` private . '' No longer . The less privacy we have , the less we have a legal right to -- and the less we have a legal right to , the less we will have . For those accustomed to older ways , this new world of compulsive and compulsory self-revelation is a strange place in which to live . Yet it could be said that we are in fact reverting to the oldest way of all . Through most of human existence , human beings had little to no privacy . For most of the past 10,000 years , most people lived in tiny farming villages , where everybody knew everything about them and about all their family . Privacy was born in the city , as E.B . White famously observed when urban life was still a new experience for most Americans . `` On any person who desires such queer prizes , New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy . '' It 's a paradox , but also a fact : the only way to experience privacy is in the midst of a crowd . The theme song to the 1980s situation comedy `` Cheers '' celebrated an urban bar as a place where `` everybody knows your name . '' Through most of human history , most people would take it for granted that the people they met would know their name -- name singular , since for most of human history , most people only needed a single name to identify themselves . When White celebrated urban anonymity in his 1949 essay , `` Here is New York , '' urbanism was still a relatively new experience for most Americans . The United States had become majority urban as recently as 1920 , and then only by the U.S. Census definition of urban as a settlement of more than 2,500 persons . Will we in retrospect come to see the urban anonymity celebrated by White as a brief interval in human history ? Already in 1962 , the prophetic scholar of media Marshall McLuhan foresaw the coming of a `` global village '' : a planet in which information spread as fast as in the farming village of yore . A Google search of the phrase reveals that most users of the phrase imagine the global village as a friendly , tranquil place . McLuhan knew better . The old village was a place in which conflict could never be escaped , in which the public and the private could never be separated . So it has become in the new . What happened to Mitt Romney can happen to anyone who has ever said or done anything improper or stupid in the vicinity of any electronic device . It can happen to anyone who has ever sent an e-mail that might cause offense to a third party . It can happen to anyone who has ever posted a later-regretted photo or video online . Granted , most of us are protected somewhat by others ' lack of interest in our secrets . But that can change in an instant if our oafish behavior is oafish enough . A few seconds of oafish video can generate a lifetime of humiliation -- that will torture the humiliated person long after it has ceased to amuse the people who once laughed at him . It happened to Mitt Romney . It can happen to you .
David Frum : Mitt Romney 's 47 % video showed that there 's no such thing as private sphere . For politicians and for the rest of us , every moment can be captured forever , he says . Frum : The problem is not just with Romney's 47% comment but also with his " binders full of women" line.