Thanks, Wikipedia. Thedia.

The only truly private things are those we truly can not talk about (much like the most genuine letter is the one never sent). If we can talk about them, we will talk about them; if we will talk about them, they are not private.

Privacy in the contemporary sense appears to be not void, but presence. Privacy is the invocation of a space of delimited exposure, rather than the un-uttered non-presence of the truly private. Privacy is today the sub rosa; it seems never to be, politically speaking, the passage in silence that Wittgenstein implores.

Therefore, what does it mean to appeal to a "right to privacy?" What does it mean to protest Facebook privacy policies? It seems that in its commonest articulation, what is apparently most invoked by a right to privacy is not, in the end, a right FROM intrusion, but is rather a right to freedom from self-incrimination. A right to privacy in the contemporary sense is actually a way of saying "do not use these things that I name private, for despite their non-being-in-a-sate-of-true-privacy (unuttered, unutterable), in so naming them I claim them away from you and from your ability to use them." A right to privacy today seems more an impoundment than a prohibition. "Allow me to disseminate these things without repercussion." This is especially relevant, despite its lack of rigor, in view of a time when biometric technology increasingly forces our bodies to speak for us, to divulge what we would not divulge purposefully, in the form of an actual techno-scientific intrusion. Therefore, in THIS respect a right to privacy does remain an impoundment, but with the caveat that in this instance it is the prohibition of the collection of information about our bodies obtained without uttering them AND without consent (unlike, say, writing something on a social networking site and then wanting it to be unavailable). It is a third category produced by the apprehension of human-being as bare life by the biopolitical machinations of regulatory power.

Privacy vs. secrecy?