Assignment #8

Is our society becoming more and more transparent, or is it just an illusion of transparency?

After reading two readings, I had such a question in my mind. One of the points that impressed me the most in “The transparency society” is that even after a lot of effort was passed to pass laws on privacy, the problem could not be solved. On the contrary, the monitoring methods will become more sophisticated and more concealed. And the more concealed monitoring has caused it to gradually become the power of an exclusive high-level crowd, although now we claim that everyone has the power to surveillance.

People’s awareness of privacy issues is gradually increasing, thereby promoting the formulation of relevant systems or laws. So I wonder if this means: in this context, the increased awareness of existing problems actually makes people more and more distant from the problem.

In this regard, the article also mentioned elite behavior. That elite tries to create an illusion that the cameras don’t exist. This makes people feel that their privacy is safe, which is not a truth in fact. It’s hard to define whether is the development of technology or is a way of creating an illusion. The author also mentioned that the public’s questioning of authority reduces trust and makes freedom more and more distant. If we put also put this in the concept of illusion, my understanding is that when the authority group knows the public’s skepticism, they tend to be more careful to conceal rather than change. They just give an illusion of change.

Therefore, because of the existence of illusion, the questions about privacy and monitoring have been raised but never solved. I think the biggest difficulty may still come from public behavior. In another course, social media & digital humans mentioned a theory called Construal Level Theory. It proposed two levels, High-level-abstract construct, and lower level-concrete construct. The former relates to distant-future intention, the latter relates to near-future intention, which can predict behaviors. So it is obvious that the risk of privacy breach is considered as a high level, abstract construct. We can imagine that many people will abandon the use of an app because it requires privacy; or how many people will insist on using cash because mobile payment purchases will be recorded? In fact, most people will still choose the immediate benefits and choose to ignore the problems that may occur in the future.

As mentioned in another article, “Nothing-to-hide”, the author said that this view stems from certain faulty assumptions about privacy and its value. I think it may also be a psychological comfort for people to make such a choice. Several viewpoints on privacy mentioned in the article are also related to this theory. For example, insensitive information is difficult to be linked to privacy; the combination and analysis of harmless information will show that it covers more content than the information itself; the harm caused by privacy not direct and obvious; privacy is a slow and long-term accumulation process. Therefore, even if people know that the exposed information may lead to second use, or may lead to a bad direction, they will still make a choice to sacrifice privacy. Because in this era, if you do not pay for private information, you will lose many of the services and convenience you are enjoying.

The second article also mentioned a point that confuses me. About the government’s exclusion. The author believes that “it’s a structural problem, involving the way people are treated by government institutions and creating a power imbalance between people and government”. My point is that there is a class relationship between the government and ordinary people, so the power imbalance must exist. If not, there is no need to distinguish between ordinary people and the government. So I think we can not just treat this exclusion as the exclusion of individuals. First, data collection is inevitable. Second, exclusion can be a protective way. Imagine that if everyone can access to the huge database, how can the government to make sure those information’s safety? What if the state secrets are stolen by the enemy country? The government has more important responsibilities and duties than ordinary people.

As stated in the article, privacy is not just a kind of secret, and I think that monitoring is not just about privacy. It also involves prevention, protection, evidence, etc. The attitude toward privacy and surveillance may also need to update.