The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
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A respected futurist advances an argument sure to cause debate-in a wired world, the best way to preserve our freedom will be to give up our privacy In The Transparent Society, award-winning author David Brin details the startling argument that privacy, far from being a right, hampers the real foundation of a civil society: accountability. Using examples as disparate as security cameras in Scotland and Gay Pride events in Tucson, Brin shows that openness is far more liberating than secrecy and advocates for a society in which everyone (not just the government and not just the rich) could look over everyone else’s shoulders. The biggest threat to our society, he warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people not by too many.David Brin takes some of our worst notions about threats to privacy and sets them on their ears. According to Brin, there is no turning back the growth of public observation and inevitable loss of privacy–at least outside of our own home… More >>
The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
Tagged with: between • Choose • Force • Freedom • Privacy • Society • Technology • Transparent
Reveals how transparent society is. Most of it we dont realize but is already in place.
This is a very good book for people to be come aware of their rights and responsibilities when dealing in an ever connected world. Mr Brin gives thoughtful two sided insight about some issues of how things are in the world today and poses questions of how we can thoughtfully consider the world and how it should or could be. Must read for anyone who gets involved heavily online or in public policy discussion, or is just a bit “different”. When you are aware what is going on – you lose that feeling of loss of privacy when you can consider it is often for public protection.
From time to time a work comes along that is totally separate, above, from the works of all other authors at the time of release. This is such a work. It goes on my shelf of honor (and frequent re-reading) between Guns,Germs,&Steel and Diamond Age, once removed from Shockwave Rider. Would that our leaders could read it and understand it.
How disquieting would it be if you lived in a society where every item you bought, every television show you watched, every vacation you took, in short, every activity you engaged in, was known by everyone else? Even without doing any opinion sampling, one might be confident that everyone would be uneasy about the prospects of such a society. After all, privacy has been thought of as something that cushions us against criminal acts and unwarranted intrusion by “moral” busybodies who want to tell us how to think and act, even attempting to control what we do on our mattresses. But this notion of privacy assumes that these busybodies have information on us but we do not possess any on them. What if we also possessed the same information on them? Would this make the privacy situation any more palatable for us?
The author of this book addresses these types of questions and more in this highly interesting book that should definitely be read by anyone who has an interest in the deep ethical considerations that are arriving with a vengeance as the rate of technological advancement goes into hyperdrive in the twenty-first century. The author does a good job of anticipating for the reader how technology might be dramatically influencing privacy without performing a mere extrapolation of the past.
Indeed, the author’s words are sometimes very compelling, and entice the reader into asking questions about the role of government and personal reputation. It is intriguing to contemplate what it would be like to not only have your credit checked when applying for a job, but also have access to the credit files of those who want to hire you. It is intriguing to contemplate what it would be like if the government, when required under the guise of “homeland security” to access information about you, is also required to provide a great deal of information about itself. What happens when those who spy are also spied upon, when the information some obtain about us is also obtained about them?
The author refers to this equal opportunity of privacy invasion as “reciprocal transparency” in the book, and he offers an interesting discussion on its ramifications and its weaknesses. In light of the current situation in the financial markets, the ramifications of requiring senior executives to disclose all information are awesome, especially since the bureaucratic entity that is insuring this disclosure will also be required to disclose information about itself. Regulatory agencies will be required to disclose, as well as those information-robbing institutions called credit bureaus.
Having a transparent society as the author describes might run some companies out of business. Firms for example who collect financial data with the goal of developing software or mathematical models to predict spending patterns or detect fraudulent information will find themselves having to build even more powerful models, since the data they possess is not proprietary anymore. Firms that specialize in genetic information will also have to answer to insurance companies, and vice versa, since both will have information on the other’s business (and personal) activities.
Information warfare takes on a new light in a transparent society. With everyone being vulnerable to everyone, the game will become one where one player will need to interpret and analyze the information in a manner that is more powerful than another. Citizens will need to have tools that not only access the information from the government, but also extract interesting patterns from it (as governments currently do their citizens). Data mining will become a 24/7 affair, where both the gathering of information and its interpretation will require the assistance of even more powerful technology, instigating a never-ending information arms race. A disturbing prospect to some, but a source of exhilaration to others.
This is a “Must Read” for anyone who treasures an open society. The technology is here, and the cost of implementing it is dropping exponentially. The debate about who controls it should begin. This book addresses the question of “Who will watch the watchers” with a level of thoroughness and imagination unavailable anywhere else.
Debating the degrees of freedom to be lost in exchange for security is a massive waste of time. Brin shows a practical way to have both much greater security, and increased freedom, through transparency.