Is privacy in need of secrecy, or of maturity?
Not long after reading Evgeny Morozov's complaints about more or less everything technological, I happened to pick up Dave Eggers' latest novel, The Circle (2013), which features a utopian-minded Internet corporation dedicated to exactly the kind of "technological solutionism" that Morozov derides. One of the most prominent features of said company is "transparency" something like that envisaged by David Brin in The Transparency Society (1998), in which everyone's activities are open to an unstoppable wave of recording devices.
Eggers has his company promote transparency as the ultimate weapon for the accountability of public figures (and, eventually, everyone else). Morozov, however, asserts that such transparency leads to public decision-making becoming bogged down in the pursuit of trivial misdemeanours. I certainly found myself wondering if Eggers' characters could ever achieve anything given the amount of time they spend on commenting on each other, and perhaps Eggers in part intended to make us wonder exactly this. Morozov even goes so far as to claim that certain amounts of duplicity and hypocrisy are necessary to public decision-making, though I can't recall him giving any specific examples.
I doubt that many people would find the world of The Circle very appealing. For one, many would likely recoil in horror at the thought of being subject to some of the revelations made public about its characters, and at the unthinking vigilantism that sometimes follows. Many would also be very disturbed by the amount of power ceded to the private company at the heart of The Circle (though one might take the point of The Circle to be that we are presently handing this sort of power to real Internet companies of our own free will).
I nonetheless found a few things to question about The Circle's and Morozov's portrayals of transparency. For a start, current public debate, at least in Australia, is hardly a model of nuanced thinking and intellectual rigour, and one wonders if a transparent society would actually have any depths of triviality left to plumb.
Eggers and Morozov both seem to neglect the possibility that trivialisers and vigilantes would themselves be watched and criticised. I don't suppose that the public and the media outlets that serve them will leave off their pursuit of triviality after being scolded by the scholars that watch them — plenty of scholars have already done plenty of scolding — but those who make decisions do nonetheless have the choice to listen to the scholars rather than the trivialisers. And debates over the behaviour of public figures in venues like The Drum and The Conversation suggest to me that there are, indeed, watchers prepared to argue both sides.
I consequently wondered: is The Circle's problem transparency per se, or the trivialisation, discrimination and point-scoring to which people apply it? After I'd been studying privacy seriously for a while, I came to suspect that the privacy debate was bogged down in debating the collection of data, a debate that can only lead to absurd extremes of either transparency (from pro-surveillers) or opacity (for anti-surveillers). If we were to be confronted by a real world Circle — and some might argue that we already are — is the solution secrecy, or a bit of maturity?
