Secrecy

Privacy and secrecy are often conflated and Marsh separates them by whose knowledge is being held. Privacy is ownership of your own membrane and sovereignty over your own innermost circle. Secrecy is ownership and control over the intimate knowledge of another, or of knowledge involving another, so the two are opposites rather than degrees of the same thing. One is holding what is yours and the other is holding what is somebody else's. That distinction is what makes the framework's asymmetric position coherent. Individuals require a right to privacy and organizations require radical transparency, and the reason is not that individuals matter more but that what an organization holds is almost always knowledge of and about other people, which is secrecy by this definition rather than privacy. Marsh's account of the forbidden chamber describes what secrecy is used for, since nearly all official state and corporate secrecy and surveillance serve the creation of forbidden chambers, concealing the guilt of the powerful and making discovery a greater offence than the act. The intimacy clause matters too. Secrets are not merely undisclosed facts but knowledge of the innermost circle, which is the circle protected by privacy, so holding another person's secrets is holding a piece of their self and is a form of ownership over them.

Sissela Bok's study of secrecy defines it as intentional concealment and examines its moral status case by case, treating privacy and secrecy as overlapping rather than opposed. Georg Simmel wrote on the secret as a sociological form producing group cohesion, which is close to Marsh's account of shared secrets marking intimacy and creating dominant endogroups. Legal scholarship distinguishes privacy from confidentiality on grounds not far from hers. The sharpness of her opposition is the unusual element, since defining secrecy as ownership over another's knowledge makes it structurally predatory rather than something that can be justified or not depending on circumstance.