Home > Secrecy

One may have to lie in order to hold a secret, which might lead to psychological repercussions.

The alternative, when asked about something, declining to answer, may suggest the answer and may therefore not always be suitable to keep the secret. Also the other may insist that one answers the question. See also Don't ask, don't tell.

1 Topics for an article on secrecy

• Animals, including humans (in some cases), generally endeavor to conceal the location of their den or nest from predators. In practice, finding a human is often not difficult, especially with the aid of telephone directories, private eyes, etc.
• Humans attempt to consciously conceal aspects of themselves from others, due to, for example, shame or fear of rejection, loss of acceptance, loss of employment, or other negative repurcussion.
• Humans attempt to conceal aspects of their own self which they are not capable of incorporating psychologically into their conscious being.
• Families maintain "family secrets", a mutually agreed-upon construct (an official family story) to never discuss disagreeable issues concerning the family, either within the family or with those outside the family. Agreement to maintain the secret is often coerced through the use of such tactics as "shaming" and reference to family honourHonour (in American English, honor comprises the reputation, self-perception or moral identity of an individual or of a group. Previously honour figured largely as a guiding principle of society, functioning as part of a code of honour for a gentleman and. On occasion, the information may not be disagreeable as such, but may rather be e.g. a recipe
• GovernmentA government is an organization that has the power to make and enforce laws for a certain territory. There are several definitions on what exactly constitutes a government. The government has been defined as the dominant decision-making arm (the policy els and corporationA corporation is a legal entity (distinct from a natural person) that often has similar rights in law to those of a natural person. Civil law systems may refer to corporations as "moral persons;" they may also go by the name "SA" (anonymous society) or sos often attempt to conceal informationInformation is a term with many meanings depending on context, but is as a rule closely related to such concepts as meaning, knowledge, instruction, communication, representation, and mental stimulus. Although many people speak of the advent of the "infor about their operations from other governments or corporations.
• Preservation of secrets is one of the goals of information securityInformation security deals with several different " trust" aspects of information. Another common term is information assurance . Information security is not confined to computer systems, nor to information in an electronic or machine-readable form. It ap.
• Secret keys are essential in most cryptographyCryptography (from Greek kryptos "hidden", and graphein "to write") is, traditionally, the study of means of converting information from its normal, comprehensible form into an incomprehensible format, rendering it unreadable without secret knowledge — th, which in turn has as its goal the hiding of secrets.
• Information hidingObject-oriented programming In computer science, information hiding is leaving out some details of implementation on purpose from the public. Encapsulation is, besides hiding, to provide common interfaces. The motivation of information hiding is to reduce is a design principle in much software engineering.
• Keeping one's strategy secret is important in many aspects of game theory
• Secret societies -- why keep membership a secret? why not?