Transparency Paradox: Does Seeing All Make us Better or More Vulnerable?

Privacy is a concern that has come to public spotlight. It is not long since Cambridge Analytica acquired the personal data of 87 million Facebook users that was then sold to political campaigns such as Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run and Leave.EU, the initiative that led to Brexit. This data was in turn used to solicit users with personalised advertisements based on their psychographic models.

These models themselves were built from the collected user data consisting of likes, locations, newsfeed activity (that would include posts, pictures, notes etc.) For example, if the model identified a voter as fearful, they would show them an advertisement about immigration. If the user was identified as social, they would be presented an ad about a community rally. These were in fact part of the sales pitch of Cambridge Analytica to get political contracts.

How this was done is worth recounting in itself. Alexandr Kogan, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, in 2014 co-founded a company called Global Science Research. This organisation developed an app that presented your personality on the basis of quiz named, This Is Your Digital Life. For a user to take the quiz they would need to allow the app to access their data. As many as 270,000 users agreed to this. At that time, Facebook’s Application Programming Interface or API allowed apps to collect the data of friends of a user who agreed, and this is how the personal data of 87 million profiles was harvested. Kogan was later persecuted for this, yet in terms of principles, is the opening up of privacy necessarily a bad thing?

The case against privacy is not something totally unthought of. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato his The Republic was openly hostile to privacy. In the modern world, we have proponents such as David Brin, author of The Transparent Society (1998), who argue that instead of fighting for privacy, which is becoming technologically impossible in any case, we should embrace reciprocal transparency. Apart from promoting openness and trust between citizens it would also enable citizens, who in these times are under constant surveillance by governments and corporations, to see and hold these institutions to task, consequently promoting a more honest and accountable society.  

Apart from these political reasons, there is also the case to be made for what big data enables for personalisation. When Google or Amazon know your preferences, they in turn reduce search costs for you providing tailored recommendations and relevant advertising. Returning to Facebook, going back to its early days, Mark Zuckerberg himself said in 2010 that as people get more comfortable sharing their information with each other, privacy becomes less of a social norm. The crux of the position here is that a more open world leads to more empathy and understanding.

This position is not entirely without precedent either. In the 18th Century, Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and jurist, conceptualised the Panopticon. This was essentially a circular prison where all prisoners could be observed without them knowing that they were being watched. This, however, was not simply a model of a prison but a blueprint for social progress. For Bentham, transparency was the ultimate tool for moral reformation. He believed that the uncertainty of being watched would lead people to self-regulate and behave virtuously.   

Having cursorily traced the argument against privacy, we should mention possible objections. Here there is a historical precedent that is found in Cardinal Richelieu, a 17th century French statesman, who posited that: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." This position basically highlights that even innocent information can be weaponised or misinterpreted by those in power.

The most prominent modern figure to draw from this line of reasoning is Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and privacy specialist. He argues that in reality, surveillance data is a distorted mirror. This is because states and corporations have specific agendas ranging from prosecution, profit, to social control. In other words, they don't look at your data to find the truth; they look at it to find a pattern that confirms their existing suspicions.

The central tragedy of the anti-privacy argument, whether in Plato’s Republic or Zuckerberg’s early Facebook, is that it assumes a benevolent or neutral observer. In reality, as Schneier notes, data is rarely neutral; it is a resource mined by those with the ability to interpret it. When the State or a corporation holds the keys to the Panopticon, transparency becomes a one-way street, where the citizen is exposed but the institution remains opaque.

In India, for instance, such manipulations are not without ready examples. An ongoing case which has the most clear parallels to such a logic is the Bhima Koregaon Elgar Parishad letters case (2018 - present). The prosecution here relied heavily on letters and documents found in the hard drives of activists Rona Wilson and Varavara Rao. These were, in turn, used to charge them under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, alleging that they were plotting against the State. Forensic analysis by Arsenal Consulting found that the incriminating lines were actually planted onto their devices by malware (either Pegasus or NetWire) months before their arrest. This highlights how the State can misuse its capabilities to incriminate honest men.     

The writer is an independent journalist who is pursuing his PhD. The views are personal.