PRIVACY, like hide and seek, is a game played to rules which are subject to change and interpretation.

You are never really sure what you are looking for, you often stumble across your quarry by accident, and the discovery is often far less compelling than the thrill of the chase. Furthermore, the players are encouraged to be devious both in the concealment and revelation.

Take the events of the past week. First there was the unexpected invitation to States Members to take their partners for the Secret Policeman’s Ball. Operation Blast drew predictable gasps of wounded pride from the usual suspects unaccustomed to being scrutinised for anything more than late arrival at House sittings, and who probably never knew they even qualified for a criminal record.

Our homeland, after all, can trace its ancestry to trusty native stock, unlike some other British outposts which owe their 19th-century origins to founders whose imported penal credentials were obligatory. So the discovery that they had been the subject of covert official prying offended their dignity, concept of fair play and rights to privacy.

Then, from across the water came the announcement by the beleaguered Prime Minister that the inquiry into the most hotly contentious overseas adventure of the past decade – participation in the invasion of Iraq – would be held in private in order to preserve national security and political reputations.

Hard on its heels, we were introduced to a new gem of Whitehall jargon – ‘redaction’ – which amounts to a sick joke perpetrated by Parliament where, under the banner of freedom of information, privacy (in the guise of blanking out any information that might make any sense) is used as an excuse for censorship.

Oh, and while all this was going on, along comes a guy on a Noddy trike with a high-mounted 360-degree camera designed to sneak down the tiniest alleyways between your gardens, peer over walls and reveal all your private goings-on to the Google gawpers.

Privacy – the lack or manipulation of it – is indeed a hot potato, both morally and legally. Balancing the right to know with an individual’s freedom to choose what they reveal encapsulates the code of understanding which underpins a free society.

There are issues of security, taste and decency to consider along with police powers, publicity and public appetite. Article ten of the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression. And although, traditionally, UK law has not espoused a specific ‘right to privacy’, Article eight of the Human Rights Act of 1998 offers general protection for a person’s private and family life from state interference and general prying. Not surprisingly, therefore, freedom of expression and the right to privacy frequently collide.

The problem is that people get up to mischief and behave abhorrently, and it is in the remit of a free Press and the interests of a decent society to learn about it.

No surprise, then, that lawyers for some of the most principle-challenged ‘celebs’ are scurrying to the European Court of Human Rights to attempt to impose gagging orders on the media to prevent the most outrageous examples of their clients’ behaviour from being reported – or at least to have them communicated to the offending party before publication.

It doesn’t need a genius to work out that were it to be successful, it would inevitably pave the way for an even more sinister bar on reporting the sort of financial corrupt practices carried out elsewhere. Indeed, had such a diktat been in force, it is unlikely that we would have witnessed the recent exposure of the squalid excesses of Westminster MPs.

We all have a keen appetite for information, even if we don’t necessarily match the thirst with the ability to use it profitably, while some are inherently keen to conceal it. There is, as they say, a balance to be struck.

Viewed most starkly; while the general public is faced with CCTV, ID cards, DNA banks and spy chips in wheelie bins, MPs contrive to restrict information by resorting to their little black patches, and other institutional manipulators of spin resort to more subtle ways of blanking. Most blatant of all such practices is releasing so much material that the crux is concealed or deflected within a smokescreen of chaff.

I’d happily wager that we’d all (in public, anyway) sign up to the pious fiction that as we wouldn’t want anyone exposing our own affairs, it’s not fair to pry on others. Of course, if that were true, the newsagents’ shelves would be pretty barren territory. Indeed, our general thirst for the salacious ensures that some publications openly court the boundaries and pay the price.

Across the Channel, popular weeklies such as Voici and France Dimanche regularly appear with a condamnation judiciaire notice slapped across their front pages. Not surprisingly, ‘celebs’ want it both ways: splattered all over the press when publicity is in their interest, but reclusive and litigious when they feel their ‘privacy’ has been invaded.

There is also a tension between what you want to conceal and what you are prepared to share. Computers have eroded the distinction between public and private. Once social networking ‘friends’ are let into secrets, all your activities are out in the open.

The chances are that Operation Blast will turn out to be little more than a storm in a teacup – though that won’t prevent the serial huffers and puffers from attempting to capitalise on their sense of moral outrage.

And as for the man on the tricycle, maybe Google should be advised to muse on the Pinocchio fable: the further the nose extends, the less credible its bona fides.