Openess as a Privacy Protection Strategy
Daniel J Weitzner has an editorial in this week’s Computerworld online called “Openess as a Privacy Protection Strategy“. At first it seems like a contradictory statement and he references David Brin’s seminal work, The Transparent Society.
But just as Brin argues that increases in loss of privacy from surveillance aren’t Orwellian as long as _everybody_ has access to the surveillance, Weitzner seems to argue that customers needn’t necessarily fear companies collecting large amounts of information about them as long as this activity is “transparent,”
As Weitzner puts it:
Is the transparent enterprise destined to be the engine of the elimination of privacy? Has the analytic power and data-gathering reach of today’s information networks rendered privacy a disappearing artifact of simpler, less-networked times? I don’t believe so, but in order to retain the dignity, control and occasional solitude that are at the heart of privacy, we have to start designing systems differently.
First, we should embrace transparency as a design philosophy that can help people ensure that information about them isn’t used in a way that’s contrary to legally permissible purposes or in violation of agreements under which it was collected. Our design goal should be to provide active transparency to users. In many cases, people are comfortable about information collection, provided they know that it’s happening, understand the purpose of it and can check that it’s not being used inappropriately.
While I still think there is a very strong case to be made for actively working to minimize data collection, just as I believe there is a very strong case for actively working to minimize governmental surveillance, I think Weitzner’s point is valid. Transparency of data handling, i.e., making customers aware of what data is being collected about them and how it will be used, is a perfectly valid design goal. Software engineers need to be thinking about how this goal would affect their system designs.