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Re: Rosen on transparency



Rosen mangles and misrepresents the argument for transparency.  First, the
idea he's attempting to address is for *reciprocal transparency*, not mere
transparency.  Reciprocal transparency, as presented by David Brin in _The
Transparent Society_, advocates turning the spotlight and scrutiny back on
the institutions (companies --  yes private enterprise!  --  and
governments) that place individuals under surveillance (through the use of
security cameras, data collection, etc).  If companies and governments are
going to collect data on individuals, then individuals should not be
prevented from knowing what information is being collected and how it's
being used.  Further, individuals should not be prevented from collecting
data on those who monitor them.  That is, transparency -- the ability to
see -- should be reciprocal.

Applying the concept of reciprocal transparency to Rosen's scenario below,
we would not have access to "the logs of everything she had read and
downloaded this week."  In fact, we wouldn't have access to any of his
fictional consumer's reading lists.  Reciprocal transparency would provide
the ability for the consumer to know what information Amazon.com is
collecting on her, who has access to her personal data, and how that data is
used.

Jeffrey Rosen writes:

    "Defenders of transparency argue that more information, rather than
less, is the best way to protect us against this sort of misjudgment. We
might think differently about a Charles Schwab employee who ordered Memoirs
of a Geisha from amazon.com if we knew that she also listened to gangsta rap
and subscribed to Popular Mechanics. But even if we saw the logs of
everything she had read and downloaded this week, we wouldn't come close to
knowing who she really is. (Instead, we would misjudge her in all sorts of
new ways.) In a surrealist world in which complete logs of every citizen's
reading habits were available on the Internet, the limits of other citizens'
attention spans would guarantee that no one could focus long enough to read
someone else's browsing logs from beginning to end."

In addition to my qualms with Rosen's treatment of reciprocal transparency,
his argument for privacy laws is the most absurd I've seen yet.  His
assertion is that people cannot correctly process and interpret information
and therefore are prone to stereotype.  The answer, then, is to restrict the
flow of and access to information so individuals have less chance of making
incorrect assumptions about others.  Privacy laws are necessary, Rosen
argues, because with more information, "we would misjudge... in all sorts of
new ways."

Rosen writes:

"In a world in which citizens are bombarded with information, people form
impressions quickly, based on sound bites, and these impressions are likely
to oversimplify and misrepresent our complicated and often contradictory
characters."

and

"When intimate personal information circulates among a small group of people
who know us well, its significance can be weighed against other aspects of
our personality and character. By contrast, when intimate information is
removed from its original context and revealed to strangers, we are
vulnerable to being misjudged on the basis of our most embarrassing, and
therefore most memorable, tastes and preferences."

and

"Instead, overwhelmed by information, citizens would change the channel or
click to a more interesting web site. In a world of short attention spans,
privacy is necessary to protect citizens from the misjudgments that can
result from the exposure of too much information as well as too little
information. Filtered or unfiltered, information wrenched out of context is
no substitute for the genuine knowledge that can only emerge slowly over
time."

James
========================================
The answer to the whole privacy question is more knowledge.  More knowledge
about who's watching you.  More knowledge about the information that flows
between us - particularly the meta-information about who knows what and
where it's going.  --  Kevin Kelly
========================================



----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Jones <pjones@MetaLab.unc.edu>
To: <inls310-74@ruby.ils.unc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 10:01 PM
Subject: Rosen on transparency


> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/rosen-gaze.html
> in case you missed this part of the NYTimes magazine reading on privacy,
> you'll want to catch it soon. Rosen addresses James' concerns and the
> argument about transparency briefly but i think with some good insight.
> one question: does "genuine knowledge only emerge slowly over time" as
> Rosen claims?
> ==========================================================================
>                              Paul Jones
>    "We must protect our precious bodily fluids!" General Jack D Ripper
> http://MetaLab.unc.edu/pjones/ at the Site Formerly Known As
SunSITE.unc.edu
>   pjones@MetaLab.unc.edu   voice: (919) 962-7600     fax: (919) 962-8071
>
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>