Privacy

The English words private and privacy come from the Latin privatus, meaning "withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself," and the generally negative sense is continued into the early understanding of the English word private, whose first recorded appearance goes back to 1380. The substantive privacy is not recorded until 1450, and its further meanings of "personal relationships," and then "intimacy" and "confidential relationships" developed even later in succeeding centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, privacy had begun to refer to legal and political rights, associated with modernity and advanced civilization, and attributed relatively or very high value. These associations were not transferred to private in its meanings of selfish interests or property rights or access. Near-synonyms for private as a descriptor in English in other contexts include individual, personal, familiar, family, domestic, secret, confidential, secure, inner, interior, and intimate; an Elizabethan equivalent term for privacy avant la lettre is contemplation.

Many European languages do not have exact equivalents of the terms private and privacy. In Dutch, for example, the words eigen (cognate with "own") and openbaar (cognate with "open") are used with reference to property or access where English would use "private" and "public." Swedish has a close equivalent for private (privat), but not for privacy. The Finnish words related to privacy, such as yksitisasia ("private or intimate affairs"), yksityinen ("private as opposed to public") and yksityisyydensuoja ("private data protection") are derived from the word yksi meaning "one" or "single." Despite this etymological diversity, few English-speakers would wish to claim on linguistic grounds that concepts of privacy in the Netherlands, Sweden, or Finland are radically different from those held in the United Kingdom or United States.