Edward Snowden’s recent allegations regarding what most of us already suspected the NSA was doing, have ignited a huge controversy around privacy and the role of the State versus the individual.
And while it is tempting to have a knee-jerk reaction against government intrusion in our lives, in fact it’s not that simple.
Whether it’s PRISM or Wikileaks that worries us more, we are clearly in a different world now. One in which privacy is being replaced by something new — transparency — and this has implications that go right to the heart of our democracy.
We’ve already read at length about the erosion of privacy. This post is about what’s next.
The Age of Transparency
Privacy is dead. In fact it has been dying a rather operatic death for over a decade.
We are now entering the Age of Transparency, an era of increasing openness at all levels of society.
Transparency arises when it becomes increasingly hard to keep secrets, and so the focus shifts to how to behave when anything (from personal info to state secrets) can be discovered if one is determined enough.
The inevitability of transparency is a direct result of an unstoppable arms race in communications tools and data mining capabilities, which in turn are both due to the continued progression of Moore’s Law. The cost of keeping secrets increases inversely to decreases in the cost of computing. We can only adapt to this fact, resistance is futile.
Given that secrets will become ever more difficult and costly to protect, our expectation of privacy has to evolve. We have to accept that it’s impossible and unrealistic to achieve total privacy, and furthermore there are compelling benefits to being less secretive, even on the individual level.
It’s very important to note here that the loss of privacy and secrecy, and the resulting increase in transparency, apply not only to individuals however, but also to government. Even the CIA and NSA cannot protect their own secrets as effectively as before. The same holds for corporations.
Increasing transparency levels the playing field. Everyone can watch everyone. Whistleblowers are everywhere; It’s mutually-assured disclosure. So instead of trying to hide secrets, we should focus our attention on how to share them. Share more instead of less, yet do it more responsibly.
Healthy transparency is not the opposite of privacy. In fact to be sustainable, transparency is respect for privacy in practice, even when it does not actually exist in principle.
In a healthy transparent society, privacy is an ideal that is strived for and respected as a matter of policy, most of the time and in the vast majority of cases; yet exceptions are allowable, under specific conditions, when the benefits to society outweigh the costs.
The Post-Privacy World
In the post-privacy world, privacy is no longer guaranteed or expected. Given that we can’t stop this shift from happening, the question becomes, how can we turn lemons into lemonade in this situation?
It turns out that the post-privacy world may not be as dystopian as some people seem to think. In fact, despite all the negative hype about it, it’s really not that different from the world we live in today. But a more transparent world even has potential to be better than a one of excessive privacy and secrecy.
Increased transparency brings about more accountability. For example, it prevents anyone from expecting they can hide wrongdoings and this actually serves to prevent wrongdoing in the first place. When information cannot be hidden it’s actually better to pre-emptively disclose it — and that’s what people do when they realize this. As privacy at all levels erodes, people and organizations become more open.
Transparency is a radical new way of thinking and relating. Sharing more instead of less and being more open takes practice and it’s sometimes counterintuitive — but it actually improves everything.
Transparency facilitates awareness, discovery, debate, innovation, learning, collaboration and evolution. And when people and organizations have the expectation that everything is discoverable, they are actually more careful and diligent. Transparency improves business, government and society at large.
While there is certainly the risk of abuse of unwarranted access to information in a highly transparent society, we won’t all suddenly find all our personal information being used inappropriately by the government, even if it is potentially accessible and even if it is analyzed now and then.
First of all there already are and must continue to be strong policies to protect unwarranted snooping and prospecting through data, let alone unwarranted use of anything that is found.
Furthermore, systems like PRISM don’t focus on individual messages or people, they look for patterns in billions of messages and data points. Within such data sets, most of us are hidden in plain sight, we are noise, not signal. We have privacy in practice because we’re not part of the patterns being looked for.
The NSA is not the enemy; their mission is to protect us. But they too must become more transparent, and they are being forced to do so by whistleblowers and legislation, just like the rest of us, like it or not. Privacy is dead, even for government agencies.
It’s incredibly important to make sure that transparency is not abused to suppress dissent. Systems like PRISM can be helpful or harmful to society, depending on where the line is drawn between what is considered legally protected dissent and what is considered to be a valid threat. This is the key.
The question is not should the NSA be able to see everything, the question is what should they be allowed to view as a threat, and what checks and balances can we install to ensure the integrity of this process?
I believe that rather than obsessing about whether the NSA can see our information, we should all move towards embracing greater transparency at all levels from the individual, to organizations, and in government. We should be asking ourselves, how can we achieve a more transparent union?
Nova Spivack, CEO and co-founder of Bottlenose, is a technology futurist, angel investor and serial entrepreneur.
