A privacy apparatus adds a privacy sound based on a speaker's own voice into the environment, thereby confusing listeners as to which of the sounds is the real source. This permits disruption of the ability to understand the source speech of the user by eliminating segregation cues that the auditory system uses to interpret speech. The privacy apparatus minimizes segregation cues. The privacy apparatus is relatively quiet and thus easily acceptable in a typical open floor design office space. The privacy apparatus contains an A/D converter that converts the speech into a digital signal, a DSP that converts the digital signal into a privacy signal with pre-recorded speech fragments that are summed so that the speech fragments at least partly overlap one another, a D/A converter that converts the privacy signal into an output signal and one or more loudspeakers from which the output signal is emitted.