I’m often quite specific about who’s allowed to know what about my day-to-day activities, not to mention my long term goals. Often, when I express these concerns or stipulate to whom information may be distributed (normally almost no-one) I am met with a lot of laughs or frowns or sighs. I must be crazy.
Or not. The outrage over the ‘flow’ of personal information on social networks like Facebook highlights the fact that people care about this specific aspect of their privacy. I can’t really see why the ‘real’ social network is much different, or why it is weird for me to request that others keep something to themselves.
Of course, a secret is a highly fertile meme, albeit one that dissolves quickly. I am not particularly good at keeping seemingly trivial secrets from everyone, but at the same time I have almost never been the cause of someone’s privacy being breached in any meaningful degree. This is especially true when I have been explicitly asked to keep something to myself.
Leaving aside the issues with having to be sworn to keep something you are yet to hear a secret, or with not being given an option at all when the information is labeled as secretive after it has been conveyed to you, secrets (or relative secrets) are vital to our privacy, and indeed, our autonomy. As one of the endnotes in The Secular Conscience explains:
James Rachels argued that the kinds of relationships we have with others are defined in part by the type and degree of their knowledge about us. As a consequence, exercising control over the type and degree of others’ knowledge about us constitutes (at least partially) being autonomous with regard to our relationships. Exercising this control means restricting access to ourselves and our lives as we choose, in other words, determining the privacy and publicity of our behavior. Therefore, to determine the privacy or publicity of our behavior is at least in part to be autonomous with respect to our relationships. Insofar as others act contrary to our wishes concerning access to our lives, they fail to respect our autonomy.
This might as well be written on my forehead. Few things are more annoying than suddenly having a well delineated professional relationship changed on account of your sexuality, or religious views, or future ambitions. We should all try and not fuck each other over. Period.