Let the Light In
Have you read Not News’ privacy policy yet? I hope you have, because a) Pattie put a lot of work into it and b) I want you to understand that I take respecting people’s rights, including privacy rights, seriously. That said, there seems to me to be a good chance that we’ve been tackling this privacy issue all wrong, or at least that we haven’t been as robust in our thinking as we could be. Right now much of the privacy debate focuses on standards of encryption and laws that forbid people who have certain information from using that information in certain ways. (Check out sites like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more info.) The argument is that everyone should have access to the technological tools that can keep other people from knowing what they’re doing, that anonymity and secrecy are vital to the protection of a free society. But maybe, and paradoxically, an effective solution can be found by making it easier for us to get information about each other.
We’ve gone over this topic before, in our message forums. It was there that I first brought up David Brin’s The Transparent Society, which I’d like to discuss in a little more depth here in the essays section of the site. Brin, an astrophysicist/SF author/commentator, argues that encryption/secrecy proponents are actually working against the interests of a free society, which requires that information flow as freely as possible in as many directions as possible. In a society such as ours, in which so much power is concentrated in the hands of corporate and government entities, the emphasis on secrecy works in favor of the powerful. Not only do they have more to potentially lose if many of their doings become public, but they have a greater ability to amass the technology necessary to effective gather and process information, and avoid or minimize the penalties for misusing that information. Think of how Microsoft has managed to thus far mitigate the damage from its unfair business practices. Or of how the control of surveillance and observation cameras seems to rest in one set of hands.
Transparency, or information flow, on the other hand, works to the benefit of everyone in society. One of the reasons the American financial markets are so popular with global investors is that for all its faults, our Securities and Exchange Commission requires American companies to disclose far more details of their operation, in a timely and accessible manner, than just about any other country. There are accounting scandals and problems in America, to be sure, but they are minimized because anyone can head over to a site like FreeEDGAR and peruse a company’s recent 10-K report. As long as privacy is the weapon of choice, large entities with more to hide will always do a better job of hiding it. But if everyone knows everyone else’s business, then we can rely on each other to watch out for each other. One reason why people do things that work against society’s interests is that they believe there is little chance they will be discovered. Transparency works against that, and helps keep people on their best behavior.
The most frequent complaint against Brin’s thesis is that while transparency may be all well and good, there are certain things that people don’t want other people to know, and that the ability to see what someone else is doing is not a sufficient tradeoff for someone to see what they’re doing. Brin takes this into account by saying that certain zones of privacy would be necessary; he’s not offering a black-and-white, all-or-nothing solution. A transparent society would, he claims, again paradoxically, protect privacy by making it easier to spot those who would violate the bounds of common courtesy, rather than leaving the tools of privacy-invasion in the hands of a privileged few. But I would also like to examine the emphasis on privacy and anonymity that exists in American culture, particularly on the net. Andrew Leonard’s Bots discusses net culture (or at least net culture circa the mid-to-late 90s, when the book was written) and finds example of example of individuals using the net’s cloak of anonymity to commit antisocial behavior, disrupting discussion forums and chat rooms, crashing sites, and so on. Message board protocols often suggest that you shouldn’t post anything you wouldn’t be willing to say to someone face to face, where you would be accountable for your words. Maybe a little transparency wouldn’t be such a bad thing there.
But what about people who aren’t committing antisocial acts but still want anonymity or privacy because of an unfair social climate that might stigmatize them? What about an adolescent who’s trying to deal with the possibility that he or she might be a homosexual, or an individual who might have a socially-unacceptable disease like HIV? Here I’m not so sure. I agree with Brin’s notion of privacy zones for things like this, but I know that in some instances those will be breached. Am I willing to see that happen? I don’t know. Part of me thinks that a lot of stuff would become less socially unacceptable if we all knew how common it was, or at least how many people all had some kind of ‘guilty pleasure’ — if we all had to accept each other’s quirks in order to be sure that our own quirks were accepted, wouldn’t that contribute to a more robust society in the long run? I can’t help but think that it would . . . which leads me to believe that the growing pains of getting to such a place, while uncomfortable and unfortunate, would be worthwhile. We may not quite be totally ready for transparency yet — we may have a generation or two of greater tolerance and open-mindedness to teach before we get there — but I can’t help but think of it as a worthy goal.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.