“We may share your information with our partners.” The sentence appears, in some form, in nearly every privacy policy, and it is built around a word that means the opposite of what is happening. To share is to give part of what you have to someone else, at your own expense. To sell is to exchange it for money. The policies say “share.” The balance sheets say “sell.”

The euphemism borrows from the kindergarten. Sharing is what good children do. It is generous, social, and free, and it is the word chosen to describe a transaction in which a person’s data is the product and the person is not a party to the sale.

Mamet writes that a public which loses faith in words loses the ability to think clearly. “Share” has done specific damage here: people who would object to having their data sold do not read the policy as saying so, because it does not say so. It says a gentler thing, and the gentler thing was chosen for exactly that reason.