Secrets and Privacy

Abstract

Secrecy is an interesting topic in contemporary epistemology, because whilst there has been a lot of work on issues to with how we understand what it is to be private there has been little work on the attendant issues of secrecy. In part this is because secrecy and privacy are often thought to be, if not cut from the same cloth, similar enough that understanding privacy entails understanding secrecy. However, I argue that we cannot mop up issues to do with secrecy in the same way we think we can deal with similar issues to do with privacy; secrecy and the revelations of secrets pose very different issues to privacy and the protection of our privacy.