The difference between private and unsearchable

Privacy is not the same as being unsearchable. The two conditions are sometimes confused for one another and the confusion is not harmless. A person who has been written about by serious journalists is not unsearchable; they may still be private. A person who has avoided all written reference is unsearchable in one sense; they may still be substantially exposed through records.

A useful distinction: privacy is a condition of one's ordinary life. It is the absence of unwanted attention in the rooms where one is presently sitting. It is the freedom to make decisions without an audience. It is the keeping of one's own counsel about things that are not anyone else's business. Being unsearchable is a different thing. It is the absence of one's name from the index of available references. It is, in the modern world, a particular kind of absence rather than a general condition of life.

The two can be independent. A person who is private (composed in manner, restrained in speech, careful in associations) may be findable by anyone who looks; the findings are simply unflattering only by virtue of revealing how dull their record is. A person who is unsearchable may be intensely watched at home, by people whose attention is unwanted; their absence from search engines does not protect them in any practical sense.

The cultivation of privacy is generally more rewarding than the cultivation of unsearchability. The first is a disposition; the second is a project. The first compounds across years; the second requires continual maintenance against the steady accumulation of records that are made about everyone, whether they want them or not.

The desk thinks of its work as in service of privacy understood properly, not in service of unsearchability understood narrowly. The two overlap in places; they are not identical, and to confuse them is to misunderstand both.