Privacy Is Different From Secrecy Quotes

Sometimes I speak to various regional banks, the ones that are not afraid of bitcoin. They tell me things like 80 percent of our population is a hundred miles from the nearest bank branch and we can’t serve them. In one case, they said a hundred miles by canoe. I’ll let you guess which country that was. Yet, even in the remotest places on Earth, now there is a cell-phone tower. Even in the poorest places on Earth, we often see a little solar panel on a little hut that feeds a Nokia 1000 phone, the most produced device in the history of manufacturing, billions of them have shipped. We can turn every one of those into, not a bank account, but a bank. Two weeks ago, President Obama at South by Southwest did a presentation and he talked about our privacy. He said, ”If we can’t unlock the phones, that means that everyone has a Swiss bank account in their pocket." That is not entirely accurate. I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken.

Privacy in adoption is, I think, a different matter. People need to have boundaries. They need to use discretion in what they talk about and with whom they talk. Secrecy is when things about you are kept from you. Privacy is when you choose to whom you want to tell things about yourself.

In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,