Entry 25 of 44
Privacy
privatus — set apart, belonging to oneself; privare (to separate)
Latin
From Latin privatus: set apart from public life, belonging to oneself. From privare: to separate, deprive. Root concept: a protected sphere belonging to the individual — set apart from collective or public access.
Established meaning
In law and civil liberties: the right to control information about oneself; freedom from unwarranted intrusion. Privacy is a protected sphere defined by the individual's right to exclude others.
AI industry deployment
'Privacy-preserving AI,' 'we take privacy seriously.' Applied to systems trained on scraped data without individual consent, systems that retain conversation data, and systems whose outputs can reconstruct training data. Privacy compliance often means regulatory minimum, not meaningful protection of the right.
Semantic gap
The individual's right to exclude
Privare — to set apart — is an act of the person whose sphere it is. Industry privacy frameworks primarily concern corporate data handling, not the individual's power to actually control the sphere.