To me, privacy is a false problem, a red herring hung out by those who would invade OUR private lives but prevent us from looking into THEIR dirty linnens.

Let me explain.

There is no gain in NOT having your basic information out there, especially when everyone, from a malicious hacker to a government spy and a police investigator only has to fire up their terminal to find out stuff about you that you yourself may have long forgotten. In other words, privacy protection laws are hollow, because they do not apply to those who operate, as a matter of routine, outside the bothersome constraints of “the law”. So the laws of privacy protection impede US from looking into THEM, but not the other way around. We are, whenever it pleases someone in a position of authority, as transparent as a glass bell.

The big untapped opportunity that I see in privacy laws, despite their relative ineffectiveness in protecting our secrets, is that they bring to public attention the CONCEPT of privacy and the related concept of transparency. Those two concepts are inextricably linked and we should find a way to make them work for us.

Since we are, despite privacy laws, quite transparent, it would be proper for us to demand the same kind of transparency we are subjected to from anyone operating in the control structure. Whether it be government bureaucrats or large companies, there should be no secrets. Openness is the new meme. And indeed, to make any sensible decision about anything, don’t we have to have all the data?

How are we going to have any kind of a democratic society without openness? We won’t.

So here’s the argument: What is euphemistically called individual privacy has been hollow from the beginning. It really means transparency. Our data has been and is available to anyone with the means to look. Since OUR data is out there, ALL data, including the government’s should be. It is as simple as that.