Private Detectives: Investigation, Privacy and Personal Information in Britain, 1965–1975

Abstract

The article examines the history of British private investigators. Historians and criminologists have shown how the police have never monopolized security or protection. The same can be said about investigation, although this is much less well understood. Private investigators have a key place in the social distribution of investigation, widely portrayed as both heroic uncoverers of the truth and as invasive “snoops.” Their work therefore opens wider questions about who should be able to know what about whom. This article focuses on the period between 1965 and 1975, which saw a range of criminal investigations, public inquiries, and press reports around private investigators, against the background of shifts in data technologies and cultures of “transparency.” This article asks why “invasions of privacy” by private investigators caused so much public concern in this period, but the attempts to restrict their activities largely petered out. It argues that the answer lies in uncertainties of the category of privacy and, more specifically, the unresolved role of the British state. In the context of changing relationships between the state, market, and the wider distribution of investigation, privacy protections did not meaningfully distinguish between who was accessing information and the reasons they were doing so. The article draws on sources including the evidence submitted to the 1972 Younger Committee on Privacy, the papers of the Director of Public Prosecutions, published memoirs, and local and national newspapers.