What's Wrong with Privacy? (Transparency Matters #1)

Over the past few years, I've become something of a transparency nut. One of the problems with transparency as movement is that very few people even recognize the term, much less know what it is. Once they see an example of transparency, they're often quite supportive.

I'm taking a different tack. I'm going to outline why privacy is bad for you. Bad for you, bad for your health, bad for your family, bad for your economy, bad for your politics, bad for your security, bad for your planet.

Or, at least I'm going to try.

Privacy as a social phenomenon is not terribly old. Indeed, the first taste that most Americans experienced was the privacy of isolation, and then of anonymity, which they got by moving to the American wilderness, and then to cities and suburbs.

Privacy as an activity is not terribly natural. Privacy isn't holy, or even well-defined as a philosophical or legal concept. The US Constitution doesn't explicitly lay out a right to privacy; the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteeth Amendments are often stretched to serve as such. The courts don't recognize privacy except in those cases where citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Privacy is inconvenient. As we see in the social networking phenomenon and online advertising, folks are trading more information about themselves and their habits in exchange for better-tailored goods and services. Though most social networks, e.g., Facebook, have detailed privacy settings, most users leave these settings off for convenience.

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." - Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems, 1999

Privacy is illusory. Private detectives agree that the most effective way to get information about someone is not through cameras, microphones, wiretaps, or keystroke monitoring. Rather, it's much easier to find all you need to know by using Google, sifting through publicly accessible civil and divorce court records, criminal and driving records, credit histories, physical mail, digging into garbage, and chatting up that gossipy neighbor or brother-in-law.

Privacy is distracting. Privacy is used as a solution to more fundamental social concerns. You shouldn't have to keep your information private to prevent harassment, identity theft, or stalking. Those are already crimes, in and of themselves, and privacy is a flimsy barrier to them, at best.

Privacy is corrosive. Many social movements have their roots in liberating folks who do not fit the stereotype of normal, and bringing the falsity of those stereotypes out into daylight. A short list of relevant issues would include: domestic physical and sexual abuse (privacy of the family); homosexuality (privacy of sexual behavior); as well as alcoholism, drug abuse, dyslexia, AIDS (privacy of medical conditions). In each of these cases, the first step toward dealing with the issue was and is confronting the damage that privacy has done.

Privacy is contagious. Modern corporations and other firms have taken the idea of privacy into the business sphere and we continue to see the repercussions. Untraceable banking transactions are only one example of a practice that facilitates more than just the recent financial crisis. Consider drug-running, gun- and ammunition-smuggling, human trafficking, and terrorist criminal enterprises. If you could trace every dollar that changes hands, you would be a long way toward preventing and prosecuting crimes as well as protecting and providing restitution for victims. If you could open the books of every firm, financial crises like this could be avoided.

Privacy is expensive. Privacy is now a huge industry. Privacy is not insurance, which has the value of increasing your resilience in a measurable way. Rather, privacy purports to increase your protection, with few guarantees. You trade your information, often along with your money, to Company A for goods and services. Then you pay Company B to make sure that Company A doesn't release that same information. And only rarely do you get the opportunity to see the information that has been collected about you – to see how it is being used, for example – even to simply correct the information itself.

Privacy is wrong. You know that your government works for you, but you still see excessive secrecy in all the functions of government. Scandals involving abuse of power, corruption, waste and fraud abound as a direct result of privacy. This privacy has crept into government decision-making, awarding of contracts, evaluation of contractors and the operations of those contractors. You should be able to access any information involving the government or its functions without encumbrance or delay. The only legitimate delay is when the privacy involved is crucial to the security of the nation.

Privacy is insidious. You want to be paid well, and to be paid fairly, for what you do, but you're often told to keep your wages private. This privacy allows you to be paid unfairly, by allowing arbitrary decisions, such as those based on gender, race, age, or hairstyle, to affect your wage. Also, since everyone is quiet about wages, you never know the true value of your work, and are never able to bargain based on that value. This has the net effect of suppressing the wages of truly valuable workers. This stems from the idea that evaluations, especially of individuals, are more accurate if they are private. Private evaluations are a sign of ineffective management. And making them public can even be fun.

Privacy is inefficient. You have to waste time, and you even receive lower-quality of care, because of waste in the medical industry. This waste is due to privacy considerations around the sharing of your medical records, at least in part. This privacy is supported by an absurd system that requires you to keep secrets from your current and future insurance companies, at the risk of your own health. Worse yet, medicine itself suffers from this privacy because researchers cannot access your information, even to find out which medical procedures are most effective for people like you.

Privacy is not necessary. There is an alternative. You can choose differently.

You can choose to create a more transparent society. Imagine a society in which you can voluntarily release information, with the understanding that you can always see what is done with that information, how it's used, how it's changed, and what the benefits and detriments are. Imagine a society where your neighbors don't snoop on you, not because they can't, but just because it's rude and they have better things to do. Imagine a society where you can do good by working hard, paying your taxes, and serving your community with the assurance that you can see just how other people are doing those things, too. Imagine a society where your governments, businesses, and other organizations don't waste precious resources just because they can get away with it. It could be a society where we all dispense with financial privacy to strike a resounding blow against organized crime, world-wide.

At the very least, such a society could be quite interesting.

Is this a society worth striving for? If so, how do we get there from here?