One of the architects of the modern Internet, Vint Cerf, became Google's chief Internet evangelist from October 2005 to July 2026, and made several key predictions about the technologies he was involved in. But looking back, he also once made a startling admission about his views on privacy.
“Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is something that has emerged from the urban boom coming from the industrial revolution… It will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy. Our social behavior is quite detrimental to privacy. Technology has surpassed our social intellect.”
The need for privacy
Cerf was speaking during a media question-and-answer session at a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) workshop on the Internet of Things (IoT) when he made these off-the-cuff comments.
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There is no single official source of truth about the exact words he spoke, but The edge They reconstructed his words as best they could, and Cerf essentially highlighted that throughout human existence, our desire for privacy is, relatively, a modern problem.
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The comments may be perceived as a means to undermine what has become an aggressive desire for privacy, especially following revelations about government surveillance and the reliance on the use of personal data in the business models of companies like Google. But Cerf looked much further and broader, approaching human nature itself.
Human nature
Cerf believed that people had a natural inclination to live in much smaller communities, such as villages, in which only a few thousand people would interact.
There, he said, everyone would know what everyone else was doing, and the postmaster would know who everyone was getting their mail from, as he put it.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been massive growth in much larger population centers such as cities, and the world's population has also skyrocketed massively.
But there is also an argument to say that times move forward and our nature has changed to adapt to the world we know, not the world our ancestors inhabited. By that nature, our need for privacy remains innate, and big tech companies like Google try to undermine it by exploiting our personal data for private gain.
