Is Sharing A Private Conversation the Same As Making It Public?

Is sharing a private conversation the same as making it public? A few days back I wrote a blog post that asked whether or not confidentiality was implied in a conversation. I had abstracted the problem from a real-life incident, and I tried to answer two different but related questions in that post. Firstly, 'is confidentiality implied in a conversation', and secondly, does a person commit a moral wrong by sharing the facts and details of a conversation. I argued that human society is made possible by the aspect of sharing and that humans share ideas and emotions too. As communicative beings, we share our 'lives' with friends and family, and it includes disclosing (in parts or full) the conversations we had with other persons. I called this 'life-sharing'. From this, I concluded that confidentiality wasn't implied in a conversation and persons who shared a private conversation with others didn't commit a moral wrong. However, I conflated two concepts in my conclusion i.e. I identified the act of sharing sth with the act of making sth public. I want to revisit this 'identity'. I must revisit this alleged identity because if sharing sth isn't the same as making sth public then the latter can't use the defense of the former to justify itself and the ethics of 'going public' has to be established on a whole new theoretical ground.

Sharing refers to the act of 'using, occupying or enjoying sth jointly with others'. In the case of conversation, it refers to the use of information jointly with others. Also, we share sth within a circle of intimates, hence it's a personal, or private, act. We have already established the tenability of conversation-sharing. Thus, we may turn our attention to the problem of 'make public'. Is making public the contents of a conversation the same as sharing it? Unlike the verb 'sharing', 'make public' is an idiom that has a larger field of meaning depending upon the context of use. One of the meanings of 'make public' is to 'make something known that was a secret before'. Even though the idiom has other meanings, most of them share this basic connotation i.e. it refers to the exposure of a secret. To 'make public' sth, it has to be a secret. The secret is defined as 'sth not known', or 'sth not meant to be known by others'. One of the synonyms of the adjective 'secret' is confidential. In the last post, I had argued that confidentiality (or secrecy) isn't implied in a conversation. Ipso facto, one can't make a conversation public because it was neither a secret nor was it protected by a code of confidentiality. Therefore, sharing a private conversation isn't the same as making it public because conversation doesn't imply confidentiality whereas 'make public' assumes the content is secretive in nature. Conversations aren't protected by confidentiality and those 'conversations' protected by the code of confidentiality belongs to a different class of human discourse that shouldn't be confused with the normal human conversations.