The Internet community loves privacy, and in every respect so do I.

The Internet is responsible for the development of encryption techniques for individuals, and for security of communications, that give protection to those who might fear government intervention.

As stated in the opening 'meditation' on censorship, one of the most desirable aspects of the Internet is its ability to defeat those one-party states and dictators who would like to suppress all unfavourable comment, and keep their subjects in a state of total ignorance about conditions, both inside and outside their country.

My name is John, but you do not need to know more than this, or where I live. And the Internet gives me the privacy that this will continue. I suppose the police might be able to find out, but the content of this site will never gives them any cause to want to.

But some disturbed person, whom I might offend, will not be able to throw a brick through my window, and this helps me to be utterly free in what I say.

It is possible to do things with all this privacy that one would never dare do without it. And here is where we begin to open up certain moral issues. Anonymity can give a certain freedom, and normal reserves can be replaced by a courage to make a confession as one stranger to another that no one would ever make to a friend or relative.

There is an undoubted value about the confessional. There is a huge relief that one other mortal, at least, knows the worst of my frailties. On the Internet one can make such confessions more freely, if one is not using one's real name.

But privacy has another side. I can do things I would never dare do if it was certain I was being observed. The sailor in the foreign port, the holiday maker abroad, get up to things totally out of character, simply because the constraint of there being the risk of discovery seems to have been removed.

This is the danger of privacy on the Internet. Those who want to exploit the vulnerable, especially children, can offer images which are illegal, knowing that many will use anonymous surfing techniques to minimise the risk of discovery. The sex industry has taken to the Internet with massive resources, and is making massive profits, because people shelter behind the privacy of the Internet.

We naturally assume we are in a universe where genuine privacy is possible. Is it true that I, and I alone, know certain things I have done, or thought, in the privacy of my own soul?

There was one Teacher who said No to this question.

"There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known."

It is a good rule, and one I have discovered rather late in my life, that secretiveness is a fool's paradise. If it has to be secret, it is wrong. There are no private events in my life, especially the things I am sure nobody knows about. Everything I have done, and said, and thought, and wanted, will be "proclaimed from the roofs".

There is some comfort though, even for my guilty conscience. Every one who hears my secrets, in the fullness of time, in the better place we are going to, will not be gloating, or condemning, for they will have secrets of their own being proclaimed. We will live in a world of no secrets, ever. I will know, and be known. I think there is something to be desired here, rather than feared.

Don't you?

Perhaps unless I desire it, I will not be in such a place.

Who knows?