Privacy as a bourgeois privilege

Ruchira Paul has her own reaction to Zadie Smith's pretentious review of The Social Network. One of the aspects of Smith's review which Ruchira focuses upon is her concern about the extinction of the "private person." I have mooted this issue before, but I think it might be worthwhile to resurrect an old hobby-horse of mine: is privacy as we understand it in the "modern age" simply a function of the transient gap between information technology and mass society? In other words, for most of human history we lived in small bands or in modest villages. These were worlds where everyone was in everyone else's business. There was very little privacy because the information technology was well suited to the scale of such societies. That "technology" being our own innate psychology and verbal capacities. With the rise of stratified cultures elites could withdraw into their own castles, manses and courtyards, ...