Gary Martin: In the internet age, consent is bypassed in a world where privacy is hard to find

In a time when privacy is increasingly harder to find, an uninvited knock at the front door no longer receives the welcome it once did.

The front door used to be a fairly simple thing — it separated the public world from the private one.

It kept the weather out and the dog inside and, for the most part, the front door held strangers at arm’s length.

An unexpected knock on the door was not a big deal.

It might be a neighbour with some news, a charity asking for help or someone politely selling encyclopaedias.

People accepted those household callers because they did not happen often.

Yet these days, the front doorstep feels busier than a neighbourhood on bin day.

Salespeople, charity collectors, religious callers and — increasingly — scammers all seem to treat it as a legitimate point of contact.

The knock has become commonplace — and perhaps far too commonplace.

The changed attitude towards front-door callers has not happened because people have become less friendly.

It has happened because the meaning of the knock has changed.

There are simply far more uninvited visitors than there used to be.

And those visitors are all competing for attention, time and goodwill.

At the same time, trust has eroded.

Scams are more common and many begin with a knock at the front door.

There is also a sense that consent has been bypassed.

In a world where most interactions can be scheduled, filtered or declined online, an uninvited knock feels out of step.

To be clear, most of us still want some knocks on the door.

We want our shopping delivered, our parcels to arrive and neighbours to drop by along with help turning up when we have asked for it.

The difference is choice.

Those knocks are mostly anticipated, purposeful and — most importantly — invited.

That said, there is an irony in wanting more human contact while being wary of opening the front door.

Many people talk about feeling lonely or disconnected.

Yet they hesitate when someone turns up unannounced.

What people are pushing back against is not contact itself but contact that ignores timing, choice and how much they can manage.

In that sense, the front door is just catching up with the rest of life and doing what phones and inboxes have been doing for years.

Answering the door now requires a quick risk assessment: who is it, what do they want and how long will this take?

If we screen our calls and emails, why would the front door be any different?

Professor Gary Martin is CEO OF AIM WA and a specialist in workplace and social trends.