A home of any size is not run by one person. It is run with the help of others: those who work in it, those who supply it, those who maintain it, those who carry out its arrangements. This is ordinary and necessary. It also means that the record of a person's domestic life is not created by that person alone. A household, in the course of simply functioning, generates records, and those records describe the person at its centre.

The mechanism is undramatic. Arrangements have to be made, and making them creates information. Services are engaged, and engaging them involves names and addresses and accounts. Deliveries are arranged, properties are maintained, and each of these ordinary acts leaves a trace somewhere. None of the traces is created by the principal, and the principal may be unaware of most of them, but together they describe the principal's home and routine.

The people involved are not the issue, and it would be both unkind and mistaken to treat them as one. The point is structural. A household has many hands, and information about a home is therefore created by many hands, most of them acting in good faith and without any thought of exposure. The principal's privacy depends, in part, on arrangements made by people who are not themselves thinking about the principal's privacy.

This is why domestic exposure is so often underestimated. A person assessing their own visibility tends to think of their own disclosures, the records in their own name, the accounts they themselves hold. They think less about the wider household, because the household's records do not feel like theirs. But those records describe their home as surely as anything they created themselves.

Addressing this is not a matter of suspicion towards a household, which would poison something that should run on trust. It is a matter of arrangement and of shared understanding. A household whose members understand, in general terms, how things are to be handled, what is given out and what is not, which arrangements call for care, will generate a quieter record than one where each person is left to their own habits. The discretion is built into how the home is run.

The practical step is to bring the household into the picture: to recognise that a home's record is a collective product, to assess it as such, and to establish the simple, sensible practices that let a household function smoothly while leaving less of a trail. It is one of the more overlooked parts of a person's exposure, and one of the more straightforward to put in good order.