Aristotle wrote about privacy more than 2000 years ago. The ancient Greeks had secret ballots in their elections. Ancient China and ancient India have concepts of privacy written into their laws for thousands of years. The core idea of privacy, as something that is a basic human need, and should be a right, has existed for a long, long time.

There's a lot of qualification to hide behind in the clause "as we understand it". This is a blog post about Silicon Valley, by someone making some pretty loose inferences, using specious logic to construct an argument. Many people pointed out glaring, major flaws in that blog post in the comments.

But sure, privacy wasn't exactly the same 300 years ago as it is now in Silicon Valley with the internet. But ironically that post contains a lot of evidence of the idea that the idea of privacy has been around for a long time. John Adams wrote about not publishing his bank balance 300 years ago.

This blog post does not amount to rigorous historical research or evidence of a lack of privacy before modern times. Right off the top, I don't really buy that houses without walls somehow demonstrates that privacy didn't exist. For one, only poor people lacked walls. Rich people have had them for a long time. Walls also didn't matter as much because people didn't poop in their houses as often as we do now, so lack of walls doesn't prove a lot.