CHAPTER 1Understanding Privacy
Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.
—Ovid, Tristia
In case your Latin is rusty, Ovid's quote above translates to: “To live well is to live concealed.” My interpretation is different: “To live well is to live in privacy.”
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. What, exactly, is privacy? What does it mean? What do we understand when we describe something as “private”?
Do we mean secret? Is something private also secret? Certainly, the reverse is not true: we can have many secrets that are not private! They may be secrets of others, secret negotiations, secret deals, and so on.
Do we mean personal? Is it data coupled with our personhood? If so, is all personal data private? What about our name? Are there degrees of privacy?
Defining privacy has puzzled minds far greater than mine, and the definitions for privacy have been just as grand and diverse. Let's start with our perennial friends at Merriam-Webster. They define privacy as:
The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, defines privacy as:
And, one of my favorites, Wiktionary's definition, covers all the bases, albeit sometimes cyclically:
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