Secrecy is often controversial, depending on the content or nature of the secret, the group or people keeping the secret, and the motivation for secrecy. Secrecy by government entities is often decried as excessive or in promotion of poor operation; excessive revelation of information on individuals can conflict with virtues of privacy and confidentiality. It is often contrasted with social transparency.
Secrecy can exist in a number of different ways, such as through obfuscation, where secrets are hidden in plain sight behind for example complex idiosyncratic language or steganography; encoding or encryption where mathematical and technical strategies are used to hide messages; and true secrecy, where restrictions are put upon those who take part of the message, such as through government security classification.Another classification proposed by Claude Shannon in 1948 reads there are three systems of secrecy within communication :
concealment systems, including such methods as invisible ink, concealing a message in an innocent text, or in a fake covering cryptogram, or other methods in which the existence of the message is concealed from the enemy
privacy systems, for example speech inversion, in which special equipment is required to recover the message
“true” secrecy systems where the meaning of the message is concealed by cipher, code, etc., although its existence is not hidden, and the enemy is assumed to have any special equipment necessary to intercept and record the transmitted signal
Animals conceal the location of their den or nest from predators. Squirrels bury nuts, hiding them, and they try to remember their locations later.Humans attempt to consciously conceal aspects of themselves from others due to shame, or from fear of violence, rejection, harassment, loss of acceptance, or loss of employment. Humans may also attempt to conceal aspects of their own self which they are not capable of incorporating psychologically into their conscious being. Families sometimes maintain " family secrets", obliging family members never to discuss disagreeable issues concerning the family with outsiders or sometimes even within the family. Many " family secrets" are maintained by using a mutually agreed-upon construct (an official family story) when speaking with outside members.
