Information is not always out there, waiting to be accessed, collected, processed and revealed. We may be under the impression that information matters because it is made seen, associated, and known. After all, the word information describes an act of informing, communicating, and instructing. On closer inspection one may find that most practices of making information matter, however, are exercised and known by few, even if the actual practice may affect many. Thus, information matters not only when it is accessed and explored for patterns, or when it is converted in order to question association. Information matters, too, when it resists being known, when it is shared among few or when it remains inaccessible.

One engagement with information is to actively keep it from being out in the open, to make it known to select people only. Secrecy is a practice of making information matter. However, secrecy is not the opposite of making information seen or known. The relationship between secrecy and seeing, knowing or watching is not a dialectical one. Secrecy is more about how information is seen, known, accessed, and watched, by whom and how that matters. Georg Simmel argued that the interplay of knowing and not knowing matters as it shapes social relations. Not only ‘knowledge of each other’ (1906: 444) is a socializing force, but secrecy and concealment disrupt and vitalize socializing forces (Simmel, 1906: 448). Or as Susanne Krasmann puts it: ‘In an imagined world without secrets, there would be no curiosity or confidentiality, no sincerity or trust, and no political possibility of thinking otherwise’ (2019: 690). Knowing in secret regulates information flows and thus matters concretely. The work of confidentiality clauses and Chatham House Rule are illustrative examples of the effects of secrecy. Not surprisingly, there is a tendency to discuss secrecy as a practice of domination and exclusion, often associated with positions of power (for example, Fenster, 1999; Blakely, 2012). Carol Warren and Barbara Laslett (1977) dissociate the secret from elitist tools, but they still analyse secrecy as the morally questionable refuge for those without access to privacy: ‘Privacy is consensual where secrecy is not’ (Warren and Laslett, 1977: 43). Not only could one object, suggesting that privacy is not consensual and that the shared secret (see Smart, 2011) includes a dimension of consensus, but Simmel also warned against ‘the manifold ethical negativeness of secrecy’ (1906: 463).