For a long time, privacy was understood as secrecy. To be private was to keep certain things hidden, and the work of protecting privacy was the work of concealment. It was a reasonable model for its time. It is no longer an adequate one.

The reason is simple. Too much is now visible to be hidden. The records that accompany an ordinary life, let alone a substantial one, are too numerous, too distributed, and too well connected for concealment to be a realistic aim. A person who defines privacy as secrecy, and measures success by how much they have hidden, has set themselves a goal they cannot reach, and will mistake the inevitable for failure.

A more sophisticated and more accurate understanding has taken hold among those who think seriously about this. Privacy is not the absence of information about a person. It is control over that information: what exists, who can reach it, how easily, and how the separate pieces do or do not connect. Privacy, in this understanding, is not a wall. It is a set of deliberate decisions about visibility.

This reframing changes what protection looks like. It is no longer a single effort to hide, completed once. It is the ongoing management of exposure: knowing what is visible, deciding what should be visible and to whom, reducing what need not be, and watching the rest. Success is not measured by what has been concealed. It is measured by how little is left to chance.

For a person of means, this is the more useful way to think. The aim is not the impossible one of disappearing. It is the achievable one of ensuring that what can be known about them is known on their terms, by deliberate decision rather than by default.

That is what privacy now means, and, understood that way, it is something that can actually be done.