Having explored how privacy is key to our personal development here, it is also vital to understand how privacy and power are inseparable in our modern day lives. Transparency will play an important role in balancing this power dynamic and it does not necessarily need to come at the expense of our personal privacy. In general, privacy is afforded until you start dealing with other people’s data and especially if your actions will have any influence on that person’s life.
Transparency & Privacy: Seemingly incompatible?
At first glance, transparency and privacy seems to be at opposite ends of the same spectrum. Recently, there seems to have been a push for ‘radical transparency’ where by laying everything bare on the table, it is believed that society as a whole will be more accepting that every system or individual has their own faults. Apart from the implications that would have as covered previously, this is not a solution for the simple fact that information can be easily withheld or misappropriated depending on context. Moreover, in an age where we are already struggling to make sense of so much data, having radical transparency without contextualizing the data will add to this confusion.
Critically, as with everything else, context is the key. Individuals have an obligation to protect their own personal information while institutions have an obligation to be transparent with what they do with individual data. Transparency is the obligation of institutions to communicate pertinent information to their stakeholders while individuals have no such obligation. As such, privacy is justified only to the extent that it does not infringe upon other people’s lives hence why it is intertwined with power.
Privacy protections must be inversely proportional to power while transparency requirements should be directly proportional to power. Without privacy, authoritarianism flourishes because it is impossible to build and expand private networks that would act as a deterrent to institutional abuses. At the same time, transparency is also a new competitive force as increased public scrutiny is empowering citizens to demand greater business integrity. Hence, transparency is a precondition for building productive relationships with all manner of stakeholders.
Privacy vs. Secrecy: An important difference
One key distinction that must be made in this discussion is the difference between information that is private as opposed to one which is a secret. The line between the two is an extremely narrow one but lies at the heart of the privacy debate. As hinted above, that which is a secret will have negative effects on various parties when it is revealed. This is why most privacy laws tend to be centered around public interest as an exception to privacy.
Privacy refers to matters that are not meant to be shared and the parties involved will be indifferent if exposed. By keeping something private, it is an act of choosing boundaries and staying comfortably between them whereas keeping a secret is an act of intentionally hiding from the pain of disclosing something shameful. Hence, secrets are non-consensual as by affecting the other party and not disclosing it, the other party is deprived of making an informed decision. This is key in moving forward as we will require an alternative way to determine consent rather than the largely ignored T&C check-boxes we see today.
Conclusion
Privacy and transparency requirements will largely depend on context but in general the more power an individual or organisation has, the less privacy protections it should have. Moreover, such power should also be accompanied by increased transparency requirements as the more information they have on an individual, the more the individual is placed at risk of those in power. At its core, it is a matter of accountability and ethical decisions. Institutions must be willing to communicate vital information to their stakeholders while users need to educate themselves and be willing to take charge of their own data. After all, knowledge is power.
This is the second article in a series of articles looking at our relationship with technology through a privacy perspective.
- Why privacy is key to personal growth* (Part 1)*