Privacy should go hand in hand with transparency

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I was speaking at the recent Google Zeitgeist conference in London. On one panel, a privacy advocate argued that she was against transparency, and that all this talk about openness was frightening. She argued that anyone who favours privacy should oppose transparency.

I disagree. I am both a transparency advocate and a privacy advocate. Being transparent is an opportunity and even obligation for corporations and other institutions. But it is not an opportunity or obligation of individuals. Individuals have the obligation to withhold and protect their personal information.

In our research, Anthony Williams and I have looked at how the Internet is finally becoming the basis for commerce, work, entertainment, health care, learning and much human discourse, and how we are the better for it. But one consequence of these digital interactions is the spinoff of a staggering and ever-increasing volume of data. At Zeitgeist, Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted that between the dawn of civilization and 2003, five quintillion bytes of data were collected. Today, the same amount is collected every two days.

This has big implications for companies. People and institutions interacting with firms have unprecedented access to information about corporate behaviour, operations and performance. Armed with new tools to find information, a variety of stakeholders now scrutinize the firm like never before, informing others and organizing collective responses. Because of this, business integrity is on the rise. Companies need to do good - act with integrity - not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for their own sustainability and competitive advantage.

So far, so good. But the growing tsunami of data generated daily by digital interactions isn't restricted to corporations. A lot of this data pertains to individuals, and much of it is controlled by third parties. Practical obscurity - the basis for privacy norms throughout history - is fast disappearing. More and more aspects of our lives are becoming observable, linkable and identifiable by others. Networked computing technologies allow this personal data to be archived online, forever searchable.

Our digital footprints and shadows are being gathered into personas and profiles and avatars - virtual representations of us, in a hundred thousand locations. Toss in the emerging "augmented reality" tools where you point your mobile device at the street and it gives you real-time information about the world around you - everything from recognizing the faces of people nearby to letting you know about all the people on Twitter in your vicinity - and we can be sure that a ton of personal information about most of us is deeply and irrevocably embedded into the fabric of the Internet and available to the world.

To my astonishment, I run into people who argue this is a good thing, championing the notion of a new era of personal transparency. Perhaps this is what was confusing the Zeitgeist privacy advocate. For example. in the recently released book The Facebook Effect, author David Kirkpatrick reveals that some of the social network's management believes transparency is not just an opportunity for companies and other institutions to generate trust and be more effective - they think it's an opportunity for individuals to do the same. The more transparent we are, the more moral our behaviour will be. I've often wondered why Facebook has been plagued with so many privacy controversies in its short history. Now I know why. The social media giant thinks that "more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things."

Some at Facebook refer to this as Radical Transparency - a term initially applied to institutions and now being adapted to individuals. "Our mission since Day 1 has been to make society more open," says a senior Facebook executive. In an interview with Mr. Kirkpatrick, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the days "of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly," and that "having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

It boggles the mind that someone as thoughtful as Mr. Zuckerberg would argue this. Of course we should have more than one online identity, just as we sensibly have multiple offline identities. My wife knows a version of me that I don't share with our children. Friends know more about me than my business acquaintances. Readers of my books and articles have another impression. And on and on. All of this is appropriate.

Information privacy is the foundation of a free society, and not just because of the harm that can occur from blackmail, identity fraud, impersonation, cyber-stalkers and nosy employers. When data can be assembled into profiles, matched with other info and used to make automated judgments and decisions about individuals, such as whether or not to hire them, whether to admit entry, whether to calculate benefits or terms of an offer, whether to corroborate a claim, whether to discriminate against or manipulate, it should make us shudder to think about what it would be like to live in a world where all is known and nothing is forgotten.

Don Tapscott is the author of 14 books, including (with Anthony Williams) MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World , to be published in September. He is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Twitter @dtapscott.