Privacy is the basic tool to combat coercion. The less "others" know about us, the less leverage they have to intimidate us, blackmail us, or ostracize us either politically, socially, or economically. Privacy is the tool we use to polish our personae to others.

Openness is not the opposite of privacy. It is institutionalized privacy. Freedom of speech means that we can say things in public and not fear being coerced because of them. The key is trust that the others will abide by the rules.

The paradox of trust is that the agent enforcing the rules is exactly the only agent that can break the rules. Such is the precariousness of trust. The precariousness of openness is that once made open, it can not be made secret again (except, perhaps, by the enforcing agent).

The opposite of privacy is confession, where the exposure of fact leads to censure or condemnation.

Traditionally, privacy comes in two flavors. One flavor is privacy about what we do. The second flavor is privacy about who we are. In our brave new world, there is a third flavor, a bio-chemical flavor of what we are.

The increasingly sophisticated cybernetics of information will marginalize our secrets through detailed circumstantial postulations. What then will be our defense?

That information wants to be free. Much of it is already free, as in beer. We give it away, either coercively through mandate or as a quid pro quo. Whether it is free, as in freedom, is the crux. Information freedom is the crucible of openness for without it, there can be no trust.