Suppose Alice has a crush on Bob and wants to sort out her feelings with Carol’s help. Is it bad for Alice to inform Carol about the crush on condition of confidentiality?
In the most common branch of this conversation, Alice is predictably going to tell Bob about it soon, and is speaking to Carol first in order to sort out details and gain courage. If Carol went and preemptively informed Bob, before Alice talked to Bob herself, this would be analogous to sharing an unfinished draft. This would be bad, but the badness really isn’t about secrecy.
The contents of an unfinished draft headed for publication aren’t secret, except in a narrow and time-limited sense. The problem is that the sharing undermines the impact of the later publication, causes people to associate the author with a lower quality product, and potentially misleads people about the author’s beliefs. Similarly, if Carol goes and preemptively tells Bob about Alice’s crush, then this is likely to give Bob a misleading negative impression of Alice.
It’s reasonable for Alice to ask Carol not to do that, and it’s okay for them to not have a detailed model of all of the above. But if Alice never tells Bob, and five years later Bob and Carol are looking back on the preceding years and asking if they could have gone differently? In that case, I think discarding the information seems like a pure harm.
Ok, I think in the OP you were using the word “secrecy” to refer to a narrower concept than I realized. If I understand correctly, if Alice tells Bob “please don’t tell Bob”, and then five years later when Alice is dead or definitely no longer interested or it’s otherwise clear that there won’t be negative consequences, Carol tells Bob, and Alice finds out and doesn’t feel betrayed — then you wouldn’t call that a “secret”. I guess for it to be a “secret” Carol would have to promise to carry it to her grave, even if circumstances changed, or something.
In that case I don’t have strong opinions about the OP.
Suppose Alice has a crush on Bob and wants to sort out her feelings with Carol’s help. Is it bad for Alice to inform Carol about the crush on condition of confidentiality?
In the most common branch of this conversation, Alice is predictably going to tell Bob about it soon, and is speaking to Carol first in order to sort out details and gain courage. If Carol went and preemptively informed Bob, before Alice talked to Bob herself, this would be analogous to sharing an unfinished draft. This would be bad, but the badness really isn’t about secrecy.
The contents of an unfinished draft headed for publication aren’t secret, except in a narrow and time-limited sense. The problem is that the sharing undermines the impact of the later publication, causes people to associate the author with a lower quality product, and potentially misleads people about the author’s beliefs. Similarly, if Carol goes and preemptively tells Bob about Alice’s crush, then this is likely to give Bob a misleading negative impression of Alice.
It’s reasonable for Alice to ask Carol not to do that, and it’s okay for them to not have a detailed model of all of the above. But if Alice never tells Bob, and five years later Bob and Carol are looking back on the preceding years and asking if they could have gone differently? In that case, I think discarding the information seems like a pure harm.
Ok, I think in the OP you were using the word “secrecy” to refer to a narrower concept than I realized. If I understand correctly, if Alice tells Bob “please don’t tell Bob”, and then five years later when Alice is dead or definitely no longer interested or it’s otherwise clear that there won’t be negative consequences, Carol tells Bob, and Alice finds out and doesn’t feel betrayed — then you wouldn’t call that a “secret”. I guess for it to be a “secret” Carol would have to promise to carry it to her grave, even if circumstances changed, or something.
In that case I don’t have strong opinions about the OP.