What Discretion Actually Means

Discretion is the most overused word in this business and the least often defined. It is usually offered as a mood — a dark website, a hushed sentence, an assurance that nothing is ever recorded.

That assurance is almost always untrue, and a member who thinks about it for ten seconds knows it is untrue. Something has to be written down. An arrangement has a date, a place and two people, and none of that survives on goodwill alone.

So the honest version is narrower and more useful. We record what an arrangement requires and nothing beyond it. It is readable by the small number of people who need it to do their part, and by nobody else. It is kept for as long as it is needed and then it is not kept. A companion is told what she needs to know about an evening and not the contents of a member's life.

None of that is glamorous, and it does not photograph well. But it is the actual shape of the thing, and a member is better served by knowing it than by being told a comfortable sentence that will not survive contact with reality.

If you would like the longer version, it is written out plainly in our privacy notice.