Deborah Orr on the transparent society

Deborah Orr rails impassionately against the creeping progress of the surveillance or "transparent" society (thanks to my mum for bringing my attention to the article). The conclusion to a highly thought-provoking piece:

[M]aybe the transparent society really is sinister, for reasons that are spiritual rather than practical. Maybe it is unhealthy for a society to behave itself not because it is underpinned by morality and watched by its caring family or neighbour, but because it knows it'll get caught and punished if it doesn't toe the line.

Maybe we need our privacy not because we want to hide particular things, but because we need a place where we can retreat psychologically, whenever we want, and to be alone and unobserved. Wise parents understand that their children need their privacy to be respected, even if, in their privacy, they do nothing unusual, remarkable, or wrong.

And maybe, our watchers, with the power to watch us, and the inclination not to be watched themselves, are inevitably corrupted by something inherent in the process of believing that there is nothing they can't see.

This all raises more questions than answers for me, as I try to imagine with my feeble little brain how the shifting patterns of information flow might actually play out in the evolution of society.

The only thing that seems certain is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to control who one's audience is (for all the world has been a stage for a while, after all) as one goes about performing identity in all but the most secluded, un-networked places. Will that fact encourage us to conform to rigid, lowest-common-denominator social mores, or conversely serve to free us from the inhibition that can come from being over-aware of one's audience?

Hum...

Legal ruling on information transparency

BBC News reports:

A new ruling, which said a college had breached a woman's privacy by secretly monitoring her emails, means employers cannot spy on staff, say legal experts.

Lynette Copland, who works at Carmarthenshire College in west Wales, successfully sued her employer for breaching the Human Rights convention.

She was awarded more than £6,000 by the European Court of Human Rights.

Employment law solicitor Alison Love said if employers were going to monitor emails they must tell their employees.

It's interesting to note that the ruling doesn't outlaw the spying altogether, but rather obligates employers to do it transparently. More a victory for the inexorable tide of information freeflow than for "privacy", then?

Big Blair

Tony Blair insists his government is not building a Big Brother-style super-database. But all the talk of 'perfectly sensible' reforms and 'transformational government' masks a chilling assault on our privacy, says Steve Boggan (BBC News).

Oooh dear. I might mind a bit less if they at least shared the information they gathered about me with me. I have a feeling that's where effective action might be taken—perhaps with the help of MySociety's Freedom of Information filer and archive project?

Transparent machines

Robots are learning about emotional cues:

Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists.

Feelix Growing is a research project involving six countries, and 25 roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists.

Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that "learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner".

The 2.3m euros scheme will last for three years.

"The human emotional world is very complex but we respond to simple cues, things we don't notice or we don't pay attention to, such as how someone moves," said Dr Canamero, who is based at the University of Hertfordshire.

[continues...]

Given that machines are not conscious and do not have a soul (whatever the heck that is—I feel I know ; ), could we restate the key aim of this and indeed all technology projects as "making technology more transparent to human perceptions of identity"?

The machine has no awareness or volition, as we humans understand these attributes. It serves as a mirror and/or amplifying conduit (according to context) for our own awareness and volition.

And the more transparently and subtly the machine reflects and/or amplifies us humans, the better it can enhance, rather than alienate and crush, our humanity (which, like Shakespeare's notion of beauty, after all has no more strength than a flower).

Ironic, then, that in order to achieve such transparency, the machine must emulate human characteristics, encouraging us to project onto it the very consciousness and personality it can never have.

A hall of mirrors indeed.

Corruption

I StumbledUpon Transparency International, an organisation dedicated to fighting corruption worldwide. On their About Us page, they detail the downsides of corruption:

Why does fighting corruption matter?

Corruption hurts everyone, and it harms the poor the most. Sometimes its devastating impact is obvious:

• A father who must do without shoes because his meagre wages are used to pay a bribe to get his child into a supposedly free school.
• The unsuspecting sick person who buys useless counterfeit drugs, putting their health in grave danger.
• A small shop owner whose weekly bribe to the local inspector cuts severely into his modest earnings.
• The family trapped for generations in poverty because a corrupt and autocratic leadership has systematically siphoned off a nation’s riches.

[At] other times, corruption’s impact is less visible:

• The prosperous multinational corporation that secured a contract by buying an unfair advantage in a competitive market through illegal kickbacks to corrupt government officials, at the expense of the honest companies who didn’t.
• Post-disaster donations provided by compassionate people, directly or through their governments, that never reach the victims, callously diverted instead into the bank accounts of criminals.
• The faulty buildings, built to lower safety standards because a bribe passed under the table in the construction process that collapse in an earthquake or hurricane.

Corruption has dire global consequences, trapping millions in poverty and misery and breeding social, economic and political unrest.

Corruption is both a cause of poverty, and a barrier to overcoming it. It is one of the most serious obstacles to reducing poverty.

Corruption denies poor people the basic means of survival, forcing them to spend more of their income on bribes. Human rights are denied where corruption is rife, because a fair trial comes with a hefty price tag where courts are corrupted.

Corruption undermines democracy and the rule of law.

Corruption distorts national and international trade.

Corruption jeopardises sound governance and ethics in the private sector.

Corruption threatens domestic and international security and the sustainability of natural resources.

Those with less power are particularly disadvantaged in corrupt systems, which typically reinforce gender discrimination.

Corruption compounds political exclusion: if votes can be bought, there is little incentive to change the system that sustains poverty.

The conclusion - Corruption hurts everyone.

Wow, corruption really does sound like a downer.

If corruption is the effective opposite of the "transparency" of this organisation's title, by inference, corruption can be equated to opacity. But transparency and opacity of what, exactly?

Of action, clearly. But also of opinion, in that opinions underlie actions. I would further suggest that action and opinion can be understood of subsets of identity—in that what we perceive, think, feel and do makes up the sum total of our experience of our own and others' identity.

So when we talk about fighting corruption, are we actually talking about encouraging people and organisations to be more transparent about their identity? Seems like a more creative and approachable way of putting it to me. Of course, it's probably a lot easier to think like that when you're not at the receiving end of any of the horrendous things described above (although I guess we all are at the receiving end, in an extremely indirect way, when it comes to the environment)... : (

A final thought: isn't it actually the case that the very opacity of aspects of a brand makes it appealing to us just as much as its transparency in other respects does? After all, I don't want everyone to know my bank details and I don't necessarily want to weigh up every detail of the production and shipping processes that brought the pair of jeans I purchase to the shelf in front of me. I guess the key here may be choice: the choice of the customer to "dig down" at will to determine how much information about products and services is disclosed to them (and to others, in the case of personally-identifying information).

MySociety building "FOI Filer & Archive"

I just chanced upon this post on the MySociety blog about the next service they are building:

[T]he next major site we are planning to build is the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive; a searchable, readable, googlable user-created archive of FOI requests and their responses. Think of a combined TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.com for FOI requests and their responses, and you’ll have our vision.

[...]

We think that the best way to build a top quality archive is to simultaneously build the best possible “File an FOI request” tool, and then publish both the requests and the responses made through it in the archive. From the private desire to easily file FOI requests we hope that we can generate the public benefit of an easy to use archive.

This sounds like it could become an amazing tool for getting information about us held by business and government out into public. Kudos. Looks like they have some other Big Goals too!

Transparent footprints

Just how accurate are the much-trumpeted new supermarket "carbon footprint" product labels? Not very, according to Seamus McCauley. Seamus makes a cogent argument that supermarkets are still deliberately fudging the "carbon transparency" issue.

Supermarkets are making noises at the moment about labelling food that's been flown in as such (Times), so people can make informed choices about the environmental impact of their purchases. The theory goes that food that's been flown in from abroad has a far greater carbon footprint than food produced in the UK.

The theory doesn't hold up. The time food spends on a plane contributes an absurdly tiny proportion of its carbon footprint - far less than 1%, says Tim Harford in the FT. Effectively all of the pollution occurs at the stage when it's carted around the UK on lorries or, more importantly, driven out of the supermarket in shoppers' cars. See if you're interested the original DEFRA report into the matter from 2005.

...

So how might we persuade supermarkets to become truly transparent to the identity, carbon costs and all, of their products? This sounds like a good topic for the Identity Society to ponder... : )