The wind is whipping through your hair.

Hair blowing into your face, obstructing

your view of the goal and filling your mouth with numerous strands. The seemingly
unsteady, wooden planks creak and sway beneath your feet. You climb higher and higher,
until you finally grasp onto the last ledge. In front of you awaits the final challenge. Heart
pumping you near the edge. Left foot. Right foot. Steps come, one by one, until you are
falling. Praying for safety and fearing the impact, you are greeted by dozens of hands
catching you and breaking your fall. It is a good thing your teammates were there to catch
you and that the trust fall exercise ended so positively.
Two conditions are necessary for this trust fall exercise to work. The first and most
obvious is trust. In his article entitled Privacy, Charles Fried defines trust as reliance on a
disposition of a special sort: the disposition to act morally (Fried 481). In the above
situation, trust would be the expectation that your teammates will be there to catch you.
The second and less apparent is privacy. You might wonder, How does privacy
factor into this situation? Privacy has a myriad of different meanings that the term can
hold, including but not limited to seclusion and concealment of information, as per Richard
Posner in his article Privacy, Secrecy, and Reputation, but perhaps the most applicable case
describes privacy as a right to act without constant surveillance (Fried 486).
Both of these conditions are essential. If the former is removed, the person running
the course will not jump and the group will not benefit from a closer and more unified
sense of morality. If the latter is removed, the runner and catchers will not be able to
operate separately to actually participate in the exercise.
The two concepts of trust and privacy seem to be linked, but although their
similarities, they are separate ideas. Trust should not be conflated with privacy, yet the two
cannot exist without the other; there is a duality. Each is essential for the others existence.
Through his economic slant on privacy, Richard Posner elaborates on the economic
underpinning and effects of privacy. Mirroring a similar idea in Frieds article, that
monitoring only assails it [a parolees human orientation] and that it alters only in a
subtle and unobtrusive waythough a significant onethe context of relations (Fried
491), Posner proposes that if monitoring and wiretapping [impose] costs on socially
productive activity as well as socially unproductive activitythe net social benefits of the
change could well be negative (Posner 18). In other words, when individuals are watched
overbearingly, the overall effect is negative. These both support the idea that a certain level
of privacy is neededin this case, the absence of monitoringin order to create a sense of
trust, that people and society can only benefit from said trust if individuals are free to act
on their own.
Fried, however, argues that only one of these aspects is necessary, that privacy
confers [the] essential right to engage in trust and to also betray that trust (Fried 486).
This idea of privacy, that self-control and self-determination free from outside control is
one definition, is echoed throughout the sources. Throughout his article, Fried writes about
privacy through its many derivatives, including love, friendship, and trust, and he does so
successfully through a firm grounding from the rhetorical tools of ethos and logos. What is
not addressed, however, are the conditionsor more specifically, the singular condition
that allows privacy to exist. That condition is trust.
When considering the topic of privacy, it is easy to become lost in the. What are often It
seems as if there is one necessity for a person to experience privacy: trust.
To begin,