Where does secret collide?

Georg Simmel's 1906 The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies treated a secret as information that one person or group deliberately withholds from others, and studied secrecy as a form of social relation that shapes trust, intimacy, and the boundaries of a group. Slepian, Chun, and Mason's 2017 The experience of secrecy refined the modern construct, showing that a personal secret weighs on people most when their mind wanders back to it on its own, not only when they actively conceal it in conversation. Here the referent is concealed information carried inside a social bond or a single mind, studied by how people report and manage it, and it is not a legally protected business asset or a numerical value split among parties by an algorithm.[1][2]

Unit

One piece of information a person intends to keep from at least one other person

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By self-report inventories of what a person hides, how often the secret comes to mind, and its felt burden

The Restatement of Torts (1939, section 757) gave the classic definition of a trade secret: information used in a business, such as a formula, process, or compilation, that gives its holder an advantage over competitors who do not know it and that the holder takes reasonable steps to keep confidential. Bone's 1998 A New Look at Trade Secret Law reassessed the doctrine and the reasons offered to justify it in the modern academic literature. The referent is a legal category attached to commercially valuable information and enforced through duties owed by others, so it turns on economic value and reasonable secrecy measures, not on the private weight of a held secret or the mathematics of splitting a value into shares.[3][4]

Unit

One body of confidential, commercially valuable information held by a business

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By legal tests of economic value, whether the information is generally known, and the reasonableness of the steps taken to keep it confidential

Adi Shamir's 1979 How to share a secret, published the same year as George Blakley's independent Safeguarding cryptographic keys, defined a secret as a value, typically a cryptographic key, that is divided into n shares so that any k of them reconstruct it while any fewer reveal nothing about it. The scheme is built on interpolating a polynomial over a finite field, and it underpins threshold cryptography and distributed key management. Here the referent is a mathematical quantity together with the procedure that protects it, described by the threshold k and the number of shares n, and it has nothing in common with a personal secret weighing on someone's mind or a confidential asset protected under trade secret law beyond the shared word.[5][6]

Unit

One value divided into n shares under a k-of-n reconstruction threshold

Recovery means

Any k of the n shares reconstruct the value exactly, while any fewer than k reveal nothing about it

Measured by

By the threshold parameters k and n and the information-theoretic security of the scheme