How was privacy perceived in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century? And what changes did its definition undergo from the last decades of the eighteenth century on? This paper explores developments and changes in the concept of privacy as it was understood by the Ottoman government and its subjects. First, it examines privacy as a social notion that had existed in Islamic cities from the rise of Islam. With some variations, the concept of privacy had one definition throughout Islamic history. Accordingly, cities were divided into a private and public sphere. The former was intended for the use of residents, while the latter was the place where the government and its agents operated. That was also true for the Ottoman Empire during most of the eighteenth century. From Ottoman archival documents and fatwa collections one learns that the state respected its place within the urban landscape, and did not intervene in people’s private matters unless called upon to do so. For example, the Ottomans did not usually pursue criminals into residential quarters, but rather waited for neighbors to turn them in. They operated a team of street cleaners and garbage collectors, who were not responsible for alleys, courtyards or houses that did not serve the general public. And, after earthquakes or fires, the state financed the reconstruction of many buildings, none of which were private residences. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, things began to change. State response to natural disasters suggests a shift in the limits of privacy, evident by the boundaries the state was willing to cross. While in the mid-eighteenth century the above-given description was the prevalent one, by 1855, in the aftermath of the Bursa earthquake, the state embarked on an urban planning project that encompassed all areas, private and public. Through looking at state investments after calamities, and by examining new initiatives in the fields of criminal investigation and sanitation, this paper will address the evolution that took place in the concept of privacy in cities, to the end of the nineteenth century. It will trace similar processes that had taken place in Europe since the sixteenth century, and assess how different the Ottoman approach to privacy was from the European one. It will then argue that the Empire eventually adopted an approach to privacy that, although greatly influenced by Western concepts, preserved traditional Islamic values to some degree.