Scenario Four: Transparency builds a better world simply be privacy,” he wrote. “It will be autonomy, freedom, and individuality. The personal lives of prisoners are transparent. So, too, is the world of the Borg.” Sharon Lane, president of WebPageDesign, was also forceful in her reply. “It will NOT be a better world,” she wrote. “It will be an Orwellian world! The benefits most certainly will not outweigh the costs.” Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, a civil liberties organization that promotes balanced intellectual property law, wrote, “The cost to privacy will be greater than we expect.” Barry Wellman, a researcher on virtual communities and workplaces and the director of NetLab at the University of Toronto, responded, “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.” Lisa Kamm, an IT professional who has worked for IBM and the ACLU, wrote, “Privacy should remain a critical value and a right, and while there are benefits that come with increased transparency, they do not outweigh the costs.” Alejandro Pisanty, vice chairman of the board for ICANN and a member of the United Nations' Working Group for Internet Governance, built his own scenario: “Transparency builds a much worse world, at the expense of privacy and security. The benefits will not, or hardly, outweigh the costs. The situation will be dramatically worse in societies (countries or not) in which democratic governance is weak.” That kind of imbalance is what worries Gwynne Kostin, director of Web communications at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: “There are bad guys out there ready to exploit these vulnerabilities. There may be a giant technical step backward caused by privacy concerns.” Forecaster and strategist Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, says the scenario is “a utopian overstatement.” He explained: “It underestimates the intrinsic flaws in the technology, and the capacity of clever people to subvert the system for selfish ends. The sensor society will be a mixed bag of real benefits and real cost in terms of lost freedoms. That said, we must press for transparency at every opportunity. The only way to control Big Brother is for all the little brothers to watch back. The most we can hope is that we will be able to find a reasonable balance between privacy and the need to know.” Michael Cannella, a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and an IT manager for Volunteers of America, wrote, “This 'transparency' will result in loss of liberty and privacy for individuals but will not give the individual human any more information about nor control over the consolidation of power in non-governmental hands, such as multinational corporations. This will partially be a result of misinterpretation (by governments already beholden to these powers' and their interests) of the power of free markets to maximize all possible goods (including social and cultural). This outlook: ignores the reality of collusion, market manipulation and other limitations; overlooks the power money holds over politics (bribery, lobbying); forgets
Future of the Internet
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Pew Internet & American Life Project