Do you want to know a secret? If I tell you in confidence do you promise not to tell? Secrecy is a promise between two or more people that what they have been told will not go any further.

Do you have a secret? Are you a secretive person? Secrets are often just gossip under a different name. If you are secretive it means you are not a gossip and will never reveal what someone else has told you in confidence. If you can keep a secret you will not share any confidential information with other people. Someone who can keep secrets is therefore more trustworthy and reliable in business.

I am a very private person. That means I don’t wish to share details of my personal life or my private thoughts with you. There is no secrecy about it. I am keeping some things private, things that are personal to me. Just because I don’t wish to talk about them, and because I value my privacy, that does not make me a secretive person, just a private one.

I am quite reliable and I can keep a secret, but someone else who is very private in their own life may be different when it comes to sharing secret information about other people. Privacy concerns what is personal and private to someone, and secrecy involves knowledge about someone or something else.

Privacy can be a lack of interference and a form of respect. It means you don’t try to find out everything about me.

Privacy means that an official business or government department will treat my personal details as private and confidential and will not allow anyone else to access that information without my consent.

Privacy also means that a private business can keep details of its own financial affairs from the public. This information is not a secret because the tax people and other authorities have this information, but it can still be kept private from the general public.

If a worker goes to the media and reports that the boss is engaged in talks with a rival corporation, that person is not just revealing private business but is also ensuring there is no longer any secrecy about those negotiations.

If I was secretly in love with someone but never told that person, or anyone else, how I felt about them, those feeling of love would be my secret and I would keep them private. That does not make privacy and secrecy the same thing, it would just mean that my secret was a private one and I did not wish to share it with anyone.