The Six Spheres of Privacy

If you were the only person on the Earth, there would be no need for privacy. You would have nothing to keep private and no one to keep anything private from. This changes when you meet someone – you now have a new entity with whom you may want to withhold information. You now have your “personal life”, the internal thoughts and feelings that you keep to yourself, and your “public life”, the external thoughts and words that you project to the other person. “Personal” and “Public” are the first two “spheres” in our modeling of privacy in our lives.

Privacy Spheres are the different domains that information is classified or categorized under. Information moves between spheres via channels.

As we add more people this model becomes more complicated. We have families, friends, and different groups of friends that we’ve met at various stages in our lives. We have jobs, co-workers, and bosses. We have girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, sexual partners, and more. The list can be wildly complicated for some people, and very short and modest for others. However, the entire network of connections can be reduced to a manageable set of six different spheres:

1. Personal
2. Private
3. Family
4. Social
5. Professional
6. Public

These six spheres can be thought of as your different “lives” or “selves” – your “Private Sphere” can be thought of as your “Private Life”; your “Social Sphere” as your “Social Life”, etc. Privacy is the management of your information across these spheres. It’s important to note that the content of the information need not matter and that it’s up to the individual to determine which pieces of information to hide and from whom. We won’t concern ourselves with why that information is hidden, or even what that information is. Those two questions are irrelevant here 😜

Personal Sphere

The words “personal” and “private” can mean different things depending on who you ask. Here, “personal” means “you”: the life you live that is known only to you and no one else. This is information that you don’t normally share with anyone, not even your husband, wife, father, mother, etc. For some people, this sphere is tiny or nonexistent, and for others it can be the most dominant sphere in their lives.

The Personal Sphere can encompass spiritual beliefs that you practice on your own, or your thoughts and feelings while you meditate. It can be your conversations with yourself, or dreams and wishes that you have. It can be the bucket list you keep in a lockbox under your bed. Some people let others into the personal areas of the life, while other people keep this to themselves for their entire lives. As we’ll see, personal information that is shared to others is no longer personal. You can ask the other person to keep it secret, but the decision to honor that will always be theirs.

Private Sphere

The Private Sphere refers to your romantic or sexual life. This is information, thoughts, feelings, desires, and preferences that you maintain regarding your sexuality. It can be the most heavily guarded sphere of our lives, and when information leaks from this sphere it can cause cataclysmic reactions and repercussions elsewhere. Just think of any political or professional scandal where someone in power stepped down after a picture or video was released, exposing an act from their private life. There are too many to count!

Some people behave very differently when they’re alone with their significant other or sexual partner. They may say or do things that they would never want someone else to know. We are now entering the thick of the forest in understanding privacy, and it is here that we may better understand privacy as both a “balance” and a “spectrum”: the balance would be very much upset if someone or certain people were to see this private side of us; where we fall on the operations security spectrum changes based on what we have at stake to lose.

Family, Social, and Professional Spheres

It can be difficult to distinguish between the Family and Social spheres. For some, these are the same, and for others they may be very different. As an example, imagine a friend having cancer and only telling her family members. For some reason, your friend wants this information to stay “in the family”. Another example is a teenager who tells their friends things that they don’t want their siblings or parents to know about.

There is often much overlap between the family and social spheres, but they are distinguished enough to separate in our model. When thinking about your own privacy, it’s wise to think about these two separately. Problems can arise when they’re assumed to be the same. This isn't to say non-relatives can't be included in the Family Sphere, just that the two spheres are different enough to consider separately.

Our professional life is who we are in the workplace. It’s our coworkers, bosses, interns; it’s the people we work with and what we project occupationally. There are many examples where leaked information has an adverse side-effect on that person’s professional life. Countless people have lost jobs over things they posted on the Internet. Countless people have also lost their jobs after bringing their private or family life into the workplace. The professional sphere is one that almost everyone relies on for their livelihood and one that can have the most impact depending on how it’s managed.

Public Sphere

The public sphere is the most complex. It’s who we are to the outside world; the persona we project to those that do and do not know us; the information about us that is available to others whether they’re looking for it or not. Celebrities have a more larger public presence, and a totally different set of problems to solve than, say, a suburban teenager. However, both possess a public life and the problems it can bring. It’s easier for our public lives to both impact and become impacted by other areas of our life. When things from our private life are exposed to the public, it can be catastrophic. When we do negative or harmful things publicly, those actions can harm our family, social, business, or romantic relationships.

Additionally, we may be sharing our private data “publicly” without even knowing it. (This topic is known as operations security¹.) For example, consider your credit card purchases. At first, this data appears private: only the credit card company knows what you’re buying. However, you’re also sharing this data with unknown people who work there. You’re sharing it with any third party that the credit card company chooses to share it with, as laid out in their terms of service that you agreed to. These third parties could have anonymized data, or they could have your name and contact info; they themselves could be further sharing your data with yet more companies. Furthermore, any of these companies could be storing your data poorly, thus opening themselves to having your data stolen by unknown criminals. Is it public or private?

The answer is unsurprisingly “both”. It’s private from the population at-large, yet it’s available to any willing bad actor with means and motivation. The credit card company goes to great lengths to protect the information from the general population, but an ex-partner who has it out for you could get a job there and locate your transaction history. This should reinforce the notion that privacy exists on a spectrum, and that managing our privacy involves making tradeoffs and adapting to your environment. In this instance, perhaps the solution isn’t to ditch the credit card, but to use cash for sensitive transactions.

When it comes to privacy, not only are there six discreet lives we live in and manage, but these lives, or spheres, can “overlap” in many different ways. This overlap in the real world is what contributes to the potential imbalance of privacy in our lives.

Information Overlap

The entire reason why privacy issues arise is because information has a tendency to go where we don’t want it to go. In the theoretical world, we can define exactly what we want to share and with whom, and then we’re done. However, in the real world, tradeoffs are made for convenience; or there are bad actors who are looking to exploit information for their own gain; or we forget things we’ve done in the past; or we were carless or ignorant of what information we’ve granted access to and to whom. This list goes on and on and it contributes to the increasing overlap of information across spheres.

When information overlaps in a way that we don’t feel comfortable, regardless of whether we know about it or not, an imbalance is created in our privacy system. This imbalance can manifest itself in different ways, depending on how much it matters to us. At a base level, if we don’t care that information is leaking, then none of this matters. If details of your recent divorce are made public and you don’t care, then there’s no cause for alarm. Assuming that we do care, the imbalance can cause us to feel sick, violated, uneasy, worried, or scared. Perhaps you wanted some details of the divorce to stay private between you and your partner (Private Sphere), and now having your children (Family Sphere) aware of them causes harm to your family’s well-being.

Once information is leaked it may never go back to how it was before. The fear of losing innocence or respect can compound our worries and unease. All of this manifests itself as discontent, and it’s caused by the lack of balance in the information we’re sharing, what we feel comfortable sharing, and with whom we share it with.

Privacy as a Balance

We can think of privacy as a balancing act between these three things: what we share, what of that we feel comfortable sharing, and with whom we share it with. The greater the balance, the better and more confident we feel. The greater the imbalance, the worse and more uncomfortable we feel. Practicing privacy then becomes learning how to maintain this balance. To maintain the balance, we must first identify these three factors across all six spheres in our lives. We know what an imbalance can look like – pictures from your private life are leaked on the Internet causing chaos in your life – but what does a good balance look like?

This is a difficult question to answer, because good privacy is usually, and unfortunately, defined by what it’s not. It’s not having your identity stolen, or not having your confidential information used against you. It can even look like, as we’ll soon see, not having your mother always asking you to call her more. These are easy to think of, but what are some positive examples? A good balance looks a lot like having good self-awareness. It looks like someone who has their life together, or rarely seems overwhelmed. It looks like someone who is usually in a good mood, or who has good relationships with their friends, family, and co-workers. This balance comes from being in tune with yourself, the relationships in your life, and what you’re doing and not doing with your information and data.

To achieve this you must first identify what you’re sharing and not sharing. This process may be the most eye-opening and difficult part of all. You then determine which of that information you want to share and to which areas of your life (or people) you want to share it with. This is often already known to you, whether you’ve done the exercise or not, but can be very helpful to think through and write it down or see it on paper. These two steps are critical for practicing and exercising strong privacy in our lives.

Practicing and Exercising

Achieving a good privacy balance is not difficult, and can be done by anyone willing. The following exercises can be done in minutes or hours depending on your desire, but the benefits can be realized immediately. To start, you need to take inventory of what information you are and are not sharing to the various spheres in your life. It’s important to note, now, that having a good balance is not only about removing or hiding things from others, but it also can involve realizing areas where we’re under-sharing information to the detriment of our relationship with that person or those persons. Consider the previous example of your mother always asking you to call her more frequently. There’s a good chance she’s asking because she feels she isn’t getting enough insight into your life. You may decide that you’re giving as much as you want, but it’s important to realize that giving more information to certain people we care about can help make the relationship stronger, thus improving our well-being.

These next two exercises can be done quickly and easily, but can require much introspection to do fully. I’ve put together a 15-minute quiz that asks you many different questions, and prepares a list of action items based on your own privacy preferences:

[TBD] -- [Take the 15-minute Privacy Quiz]

References

1. Operations Security, Wikipedia