For personal communications, meta-conversations seem fine.
If you’re setting up an organization, though, you should consider adopting some existing, time-tested system for maintaining secrets. For example, you could classify secrets into categories—those which would cause exceptionally grave harm to the secret’s originator’s values (call this category, say, “TS”); those which would cause serious harm (“S”), and those which would cause some noticeable harm (“C”). Set down appropriate rules for the handling of each type of secret—for example, you might not even write down the TS ones unless you had a very secure safe to store them in, or verbally discuss them outside of protected meeting rooms; and you might not do anything with the S secrets on an internet-connected computer. Anything above C might require a written chain of custody, with people taking responsibility for both the creation and destruction of any recorded form of the information.
You would then have to watch for mutual information in your communications, and see that no combination of the information that you publicly released could cause a large update toward one of the secrets you were keeping. You’d also want to think of some general steps to take after an unplanned disclosure of each type of secret.
It may not sound like the most efficient way to do things, but there’s some pretty high Chesterton’s Fences around this kind of policy.
For personal communications, meta-conversations seem fine.
If you’re setting up an organization, though, you should consider adopting some existing, time-tested system for maintaining secrets. For example, you could classify secrets into categories—those which would cause exceptionally grave harm to the secret’s originator’s values (call this category, say, “TS”); those which would cause serious harm (“S”), and those which would cause some noticeable harm (“C”). Set down appropriate rules for the handling of each type of secret—for example, you might not even write down the TS ones unless you had a very secure safe to store them in, or verbally discuss them outside of protected meeting rooms; and you might not do anything with the S secrets on an internet-connected computer. Anything above C might require a written chain of custody, with people taking responsibility for both the creation and destruction of any recorded form of the information.
You would then have to watch for mutual information in your communications, and see that no combination of the information that you publicly released could cause a large update toward one of the secrets you were keeping. You’d also want to think of some general steps to take after an unplanned disclosure of each type of secret.
It may not sound like the most efficient way to do things, but there’s some pretty high Chesterton’s Fences around this kind of policy.