Privacy is often described as if it were the absence of disclosure. The private person is the one who has not shared. The private matter is the one that has not been revealed. The private life is the one that the world does not know about.

Considered carefully, this is not quite right. Almost nothing about a person's life is, in fact, undisclosed. The record of any seriously connected person is now, by default, substantial. The question is not whether disclosure has happened; the question is what has been done about the disclosures that have happened.

Privacy, on this view, is a form of attention rather than concealment. It is the attention paid to what is on the record, what the record says, how the record is read, and what should be done where it is wrong. It is a sustained, considered relationship with one's own publicness rather than a withdrawal from it.

The distinction matters because it changes what the work looks like. Concealment, where it is attempted, fails because the underlying records persist. Attention, sustained over time, produces a record that more accurately represents the person it concerns, which is a result that does not depend on what is or is not in any particular file.

It also changes the relationship the principal has with the matter. Concealment is, by its nature, anxious; one is always at risk of the exposure that has not yet happened. Attention is, by its nature, settled; one has considered what is there, decided what matters, and addressed what should be addressed. The composure that results is itself part of the answer.