The Dark Age of Transparency

+ This article is a monthly column written for the Chinese business magazine Asian Business Leaders and TMT news service Interfax in August 2008 +

Imagine a world where all walls are transparent. How would you behave? How would that change society? Exploring digital futures can be extrapolating the effects of the spread of new technologies or services and emerging social behaviors. While the term “progress” usually retains a positive connotation, it is with some worry in our heart we are about to introduce what we call “the Dark Age of Transparency”.

The Age of Transparency?

The spread of digital cameras and camera phones has not turned everyone into a citizen-journalist, but certainly turned us into digital content producers. So far, this has not been overly worrisome, but its combination with advances of search technologies (be it Google, Baidu or specialized search engines or portals) has turned the world into an increasingly transparent place.
For instance, before a business meeting, we generally do a quick “personal due diligence” using Google or LinkedIn (a popular business social network) on the person we are about to meet, to explore possible common connections, knowledge or experiences that could help the meeting be more friendly and productive. Have you tried to type your own name in a search engine before? Have you tried some of your friends? Generally, we find information we know is there, but this is about to change.

Sex, Lies and Videotape

Public figures have been the first victims of the multiplication of production tools (digital cameras, camera phones, blogs), search that help find them, and sharing tools (P2P file sharing software and “user-generated content” sites). Sex tapes involving celebrities in the late nineties appeared online in the late nineties and stolen private shots or videos are still popular today, as a recent scandal involving a Hong Kong celebrity proved.

But there was more to come. If you have heard of the “iPhone girl ”, a factory worker testing the iPhone cameras in a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen who has turned in a few weeks into a minor web celebrity, you probably get the idea.

In 2004, in South Korea, a famous PR company decided to lower the risk of using celebrities for product endorsement (a common practice in advertising in Korea) by commissioning a research on the top 125 Korean entertainers. They interviewed 10 journalists to collect facts, opinions and rumors for this file to be used internally. Think about it for a second: a PowerPoint file with profiles and crusty details on all the major celebs in your country! Would you be interested to have a look at it? Do you think your friends would be as well? “Yes” was the opinion of one of this company’s employees, who forwarded a draft to a friend. Combine this with high-speed broadband and the file was found flying across the country literally at the speed of light. Within a few weeks, the file became known as the “Entertainers X-File” and most Korean netizens had heard about it. Many celebrities were not really enthusiastic and got together to sue the company, finally settling for a out-of-court agreement to cut down on media coverage. What is interesting here is:

• The speed
• The content
• The cost: an estimated 2,000 USD was spent on the interviews, and a bit more effort for compiling and formatting.

And those were the early signs of the coming Dark Age: large scale private information exposure via legal means.

Don’t tag me, bro !

How can you be dark and transparent? Well, darkness is what fills your heart when too much transparency has made your life uncomfortable. We were mentioning above the personal due diligence we carry in business, and that information “out there” was generally created by, or at least known to you. This usually happens via what we could call “self-tagging” (ST) and “active tagging” (AT).

What happens when you come across information you never knew was there? You’ve just stepped into the twilight zone. If you are a Facebook user, you might have seen some pictures tagged with your name by friends that you would rather not put online. Unfortunately, social codes make it often difficult to send a “take-down notice” to a friend who probably has a different opinion on the picture. We know that airport security and even casinos are using fairly sophisticated face recognition technology. Its intended usage in airports is reminiscent of the “pre-crime” detection in the story “Minority Report” by science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick . Without going too far, it is quite easy to imagine that face recognition could enable searching for any other picture of a person across the Internet. This is where it becomes interesting: without even tagging a picture, this would enable finding photos of a person based simply on an initial shot! How many pictures do you think are out there with your face on it? Are you including those taken by people you don’t know and who don’t know you either? Welcome to the scary world of “passive tagging” (PT).

But I have nothing to hide – only terrorists do!

Maybe, maybe not. We know people generally as one-faceted persons within a given social context: a colleague, a friend, a teacher, etc. The fact is – and you can consider yourself as a perfect example – that we constantly juggle with various “identities” or social roles. Have you met your dentist wearing his Speedo at the swimming pool before? You might have felt the effect of this identity kaleidoscope. Often, we even have different names corresponding to those various social contexts: “Mr Doe”, “John”, “Dr. Doe”, “Jo”, “Teacher”, “Dad”, “Bro”, “Son”, “My sweet candy-bar”, or anonymous when buying a subway ticket. Maintaining separate identities will become increasingly difficult, and numerous conflicts will arise as transparency might turn into the ultimate threat to privacy.

Do you know what the legal definition of a private space is in your country? You’d better find out. In the US, pictures taken from outside even into your living room are considered legal to share. Celebrities have been suffering from this for years with paparazzi, regular folks are about to experience it. Publishing on the Internet a picture of you picking your nose or even of your private wanderings in your living room cannot be fought against easily. All the more so if you have no idea the picture is online, not associated with your name, and published by a total stranger depending on another country’s legal system!

After the Dark Age

Are you worried? Feel free to join our Facebook club. It is certain this will bring about unexpected social effects, starting with public figures who often rely on building a consistent persona and will be unable to hide the inconsistent bits. Now we have established that the spread of:

• Digital production tools
• Search
• Sharing
• Active and passive tagging technologies

… are all likely to create a bunch of social and legal issues, we would like to end on a positive note.

The idea is: then what? It is more a wish than a certain scenario, but we hope for the following: once a large number of people will have directly experienced or been in close contact with someone who suffered the tough effects of transparency, we might start to observe a social change. What increased transparency – made permanent on the Internet via the Google cache – will possibly teach us is tolerance and better understanding of the complexity of human nature. Welcome to this Brave New Digital World.