Privacy and Knowledge Production Across Contexts

Abstract

In his seminal article, The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies, Georg Simmel (1906) argued that secrecy is a "universal sociological form" defined by hiding something in certain contexts (p. 463). Although secrecy can constitute a barrier between people, separating those who know the secret from those who don't, secrecy within a social space binds people together; secrecy in this context "determines the reciprocal relations of those who possess the secret in common" (p. 470). Those relations are often governed by rules that protect the secret, whether that is a Masonic rite, a pledge at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a provision in a contract, or a norm developed over time. In other words, far from stifling conversation, social interaction, and sharing, formal and informal rules about secrecy, privacy, and information dissemination actually allow social groups to share information among their members, contributing to social solidarity, cohesion, and even knowledge production.This chapter begins where Simmel and many other social and legal scholars left off. In contrast to many traditional theories of privacy (Westin 1967; Inness 1992; Rosen 2000), we argue, as one of us has argued before, that privacy rules and norms are essential to social interaction and generativity (Waldman 2018). Through primary source research, we suggest that the rules and norms governing information privacy in three knowledge creation contexts -Chatham House, Gordon Research Conferences ("GRC"), and the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group ("BITAG") -are