Privacy is often confused with secrecy, and the confusion does real harm. It makes people who value their privacy feel they must have something to conceal, and it makes the work of protecting privacy sound faintly disreputable. The two are not the same thing.

Secrecy is the concealment of something specific, usually because its disclosure would be damaging. Privacy is something quite different and far broader. It is simply the ordinary condition of having a say in what is known about oneself, and by whom. A person with nothing whatever to hide still has a strong and legitimate interest in their privacy, in exactly the way that a person with nothing to steal still closes their front door.

The distinction matters because the two are protected differently. Secrecy depends on a fact remaining unknown, and is therefore fragile: once the thing is out, secrecy is finished. Privacy does not depend on concealment at all. It depends on proportion and control, on a person, rather than chance or the convenience of others, deciding what is generally known about their life and their family.

Understood this way, protecting one's privacy is not an act of evasion. It is an act of ordinary good order, no different in spirit from managing one's affairs carefully in any other respect. The person who attends to what can be found about them is not hiding. They are simply declining to let the matter be settled by accident.

This is worth saying plainly because the people who would most benefit from attending to their privacy are sometimes the most reluctant, feeling that to do so implies something to conceal. It implies nothing of the kind. It implies only that a person would prefer the account of their life that the world can readily reach to be one they have had some hand in: accurate, proportionate, and theirs.