Tech Transparency: NYT’s Sex & the Digital City

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Has anyone coined a term like tech-transparency?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/sex-and-the-digital-city/
Robert Wright’s Times blog entry today is mainly about (what else) celebrity adultery, e.g.:

“Afterall, Woods and Sanford and Letterman weren’t just victims of their libidos; they were victims of the new transparency…”

I love this quote: “In this view, one ingredient of an effective moral system is hypocrisy.” He who owns the information can manipulate it to his advantage.

Wright does not address the bigger picture, but some of the posted comments get it. It’s old news that credit card companies know and mine the minutest details of every financial transaction you make. Even when who owns that transaction isn’t really settled law. Is it your’s or the credit card company‘s? If sales tax are due, public agencies claim they have an interest. What about the owners of the venue where the transaction took place, e.i. the mall? We simply haven’t been doing this very long, and society is not talking about it.

But the fear of technical transparency scares everyone. If all transactions were in fact public, publicly traded companies would not have any secrets either. You could look up precisely how many white hatchback Prius (what’s the plural?) Toyota sold last year. Technically, this is simple. Politically, the SEC could conceivably demand it. It wouldn’t hurt the NYSE.

Scariest of all however, technologists were calling for a cashless society back in the 80’s. Ecash is doable, but NOBODY wants THAT kind of transparency, least of all the politicians. When you can’t hide a bribe or any sort of in kind exchange…