Digifesto

I’ve turned from page 2 to page 3 of The Black Box Society (I can be a slow reader). Pasquale sets up the dichotomy around which the drama of the hinges like so:

But while powerful businesses, financial institutions, and government agencies hide their actions behind nondisclosure agreements, “proprietary methods”, and gag rules, our own lives are increasingly open books. Everything we do online is recorded; the only questions lft are to whom the data will be available, and for how long. Anonymizing software may shield us for a little while, but who knows whether trying to hide isn’t the ultimate red flag for watchful authorities? Surveillance cameras, data brokers, sensor networks, and “supercookies” record how fast we drive, what pills we take, what books we read, what websites we visit. The law, so aggressively protective of secrecy in the world of commerce, is increasingly silent when it comes to the privacy of persons.

That incongruity is the focus of this book.

This is a rhetorically powerful paragraph and it captures a lot of trepidation people have about the power of larger organization relative to themselves.

I have been inclined to agree with this perspective for a lot of my life. I used to be the kind of person who thought Everything Should Be Open. Since then, I’ve developed what I think is a more nuanced view of transparency: some secrecy is necessary. It can be especially necessary for powerful organizations and people.

Why?

Well, it depends on the physical properties of information. (Here is an example of how a proper understanding of the mechanics of information can support the transcendent project as opposed to a merely critical project).

Any time you interact with something or somebody else in a meaningful way, you affect the state of each other in probabilistic space. That means there has been some kind of flow of information. If an organization interacts with a lot of people, it is going to absorb information about a lot of people. Recording this information as ‘data’ is something that has been done for a long time because that is what allows organizations to do intelligent things vis a vis the people they interact with. So businesses, financial institutions, and governments recording information about people is nothing new.

Pasquale suggests that this recording is a threat to our privacy, and that the secrecy of the organizations that do the recording gives them power over us. But this is surely a false dichotomy. Why? Because if an organization records information about a lot of people, and then doesn’t maintain some kind of secrecy, then that information is no longer private! To, like, everybody else. In other words, maintaining secrecy is one way of ensuring confidentiality, which is surely an important part of privacy.

I wonder what happens if we continue to read The Black Box society with this link between secrecy, confidentiality, and privacy in mind.