From the blog /message:
There is a fundamentally Western perception of rights of privacy -- the right to seclude oneself -- as in the privacy of one's home -- and to conceal information from other people and the state. This includes the right to selectively decide what to reveal about oneself. The notion of what sorts of information may be kept private differs widely across cultures, and while some governments have established laws ensuring privacy rights, many do not. And other laws -- like tax laws -- explicitly require access to information that individuals might otherwise want to keep private.
Our ideas of privacy are not universal, and can't be translated well into languages where cultural norms vary greatly. For example, physical modesty varies greatly across cultures, ranging from nearly naked models on catwalks or the average person on a Miami beach, to women in Islamic countries covering their body, hair, arms, legs, and even the face. But even within a country like the US, bodily modesty varies enormously.
We find similar variability in people's notions of privacy online. Some people are the web equivalent of nudists: they live very open lives on the web, revealing the intimate details of their relationships, what they think of friends and co-workers, their interactions with family and authorities. But, as in the Márquez quote, even these apparently wide open web denizens may keep some things private, or secret.
Secrecy carries connotations beyond those linked to privacy. Secrets are often shared, and as such are social objects that link those sharing the secrets together, and excluding others. Secrecy also may imply shame, or the likelihood of repercussions if the secret is revealed. This dimension of secrecy does overlap with some of the deeper motivations for personal privacy. Lastly, corporations and governments have and keep secrets, like the Coca Cola formula or cell phone recordings of prisoners at Guantanamo. And of course, repressive governments may attempt to conceal large parts of what is going on elsewhere from their citizens, like the the way that China is selectively blocking access to the web.
Obviously secrecy and privacy are critically important aspects of what is happening on the web, and much of the design of social tools is based on certain premises about privacy and secrecy, and the role that they play in social interactions.
Consider the core premises of pre-web and Web 1.0 era collaborative tools, which are still the major form of enterprise software. These are based on the premise that an individual's rights and responsibilities are based on group membership, and the role that individuals play within these groups.