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yes, power wants to act surreptitiously because that minimizes both reputational damage and potential resistance, and transparency is a natural counter to that.

yes, power wants to act surreptitiously because that minimizes both reputational damage and potential resistance, and transparency is a natural counter to that. i'm a strong proponent that transparency should increase superlinearly with power, which is something that our framers (in the US) had approximated, but never made particularly explicit. the average individual has a substantial right to privacy, basically having much autonomy to control information disseminated about themselves. on the other end, the average multinational conglomerate should have basically no privacy, for the company itself, its owners, and its management, as well as its political & commercial transactions. of course you'd have to be careful of the privacy rights of customers and suppliers (who'd also have varying transparency levels for themselves), but those could be anonymized. the neat aspect of that is that only larger entities would tend to be susceptible to being deanonymized through transaction pattern analysis, which is fine, since larger entities require more transparency anyway. in between are powerful individuals (full politicoeconomic transparency required) and small businesses (little transparency required).

wpietri 6y ago
Yes, exactly. For me, right to privacy declines with impact to others. What you're doing alone in your house? Don't care. Between consenting adults? I almost don't care, except when public health matters (e.g., STDs, or COVID contact tracing). but the more we move toward public impact, the more I think there's a public right to know. Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. Me lending my brother some money is reasonably seen as private. Me giving the same amount of money to a legislator as a bribe is something I might want to keep secret, but given the public impact, can't really be called private.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I don’t find what happens between consenting adults to have a compelling STD-related public health reason to breach privacy. If you do, could you expand on why you think that?
  - solveit 6y ago
    Not OP, but it is not clear that people should have the right to risk infection. The problem isn't that the person could get sick (which is something an adult should be able to make an informed decision on), but that having an infectious disease gives you the ability to spread said disease to nonconsenting people. If you think weapons should be regulated, you should think that a bad enough disease should also be regulated.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I'm referring to things that exist already. Sex is generally private, but if somebody is transmitting STDs while they do it, they are subject to public health contact tracing, which goes like this: https://www.ncsddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/infographic_5-26-16.pdf https://www.ncsddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/infographi... Actual details vary by state, but this is how CA does it: https://dhs.saccounty.net/PUB/Pages/Communicable-Disease-Control/GI-STD-Control.aspx https://dhs.saccounty.net/PUB/Pages/Communicable-Disease-Con... This seems reasonable to me. I don't think the right to privacy extends as far as the right to secretly give people diseases, especially ones that cause permanent damage and possible death.
- salawat 6y ago
  >Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. You seemed like were balancing things, then you ruined it by speaking out both sides of your mouth with that. What you've effectively endorsed is "You have the right to privacy/secrecy as long as I don't care to look." Everyone already has that. The entire point of a right to privacy/secrecy is to strictly corral what can be looked at/for/and how even when the People come looking. You just threw out the entire point of the 4th Amendment there. No need for warrants, or to strictly define what the public interest is. Just define anything you're looking at as the public interest and have a party. Hell, you even threw out a workable implementation avenue of specifying that this carve out from the 4th only applies to legal fictions, which wouldsolve half your issues right there. Anything illegal would have to be done by a particular person or cohort of people outside the confines of legal fictions, meaning evidence lines should very clearly lead to individual parties; or at least until people stopped using corporate entities to do sketchy things plausibly like they do now.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    That's quite dramatic. I'm drawing a distinction between private matters (things where the involved parties are both fully in the know and are the only ones impacted) and secrecy (working definition: ones with information asymmetries that don't match the impact). This is obviously a tricky and subtle distinction, so yes, one absolutely needs the sort of power-restricting and rights-balancing apparatus that getting a warrant is an example of.
contravariant 6y ago
I know it's not a popular term in the U.S. but the socialist answer would be that companies serve the public and should therefore make information freely available unless there's a good reason not to. For the same reason companies shouldn't get to keep or distribute information on the very people they're supposed to be serving (unless there's a good reason to). So rather than transparency increasing with power, you could also say that the lack of transparency itself is placing powers in the exact opposite place of where it should be.
- clairity 6y ago
  that's viewed with skepticism because it presumes, or at least implies, that socialism inherently and structurally solves the transparency problem, but it still requires similar policy to augment the underlying ideology appropriately. there's no free lunch when it comes to some (usually small) proportion of people trying to leverage a system.

wpietri 6y ago

Yes, exactly. For me, right to privacy declines with impact to others. What you're doing alone in your house? Don't care. Between consenting adults? I almost don't care, except when public health matters (e.g., STDs, or COVID contact tracing). but the more we move toward public impact, the more I think there's a public right to know. Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. Me lending my brother some money is reasonably seen as private. Me giving the same amount of money to a legislator as a bribe is something I might want to keep secret, but given the public impact, can't really be called private.

sokoloff 6y ago
I don’t find what happens between consenting adults to have a compelling STD-related public health reason to breach privacy. If you do, could you expand on why you think that?
- solveit 6y ago
  Not OP, but it is not clear that people should have the right to risk infection. The problem isn't that the person could get sick (which is something an adult should be able to make an informed decision on), but that having an infectious disease gives you the ability to spread said disease to nonconsenting people. If you think weapons should be regulated, you should think that a bad enough disease should also be regulated.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I'm referring to things that exist already. Sex is generally private, but if somebody is transmitting STDs while they do it, they are subject to public health contact tracing, which goes like this: https://www.ncsddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/infographic_5-26-16.pdf https://www.ncsddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/infographi... Actual details vary by state, but this is how CA does it: https://dhs.saccounty.net/PUB/Pages/Communicable-Disease-Control/GI-STD-Control.aspx https://dhs.saccounty.net/PUB/Pages/Communicable-Disease-Con... This seems reasonable to me. I don't think the right to privacy extends as far as the right to secretly give people diseases, especially ones that cause permanent damage and possible death.
salawat 6y ago
>Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. You seemed like were balancing things, then you ruined it by speaking out both sides of your mouth with that. What you've effectively endorsed is "You have the right to privacy/secrecy as long as I don't care to look." Everyone already has that. The entire point of a right to privacy/secrecy is to strictly corral what can be looked at/for/and how even when the People come looking. You just threw out the entire point of the 4th Amendment there. No need for warrants, or to strictly define what the public interest is. Just define anything you're looking at as the public interest and have a party. Hell, you even threw out a workable implementation avenue of specifying that this carve out from the 4th only applies to legal fictions, which wouldsolve half your issues right there. Anything illegal would have to be done by a particular person or cohort of people outside the confines of legal fictions, meaning evidence lines should very clearly lead to individual parties; or at least until people stopped using corporate entities to do sketchy things plausibly like they do now.
- wpietri 6y ago
  That's quite dramatic. I'm drawing a distinction between private matters (things where the involved parties are both fully in the know and are the only ones impacted) and secrecy (working definition: ones with information asymmetries that don't match the impact). This is obviously a tricky and subtle distinction, so yes, one absolutely needs the sort of power-restricting and rights-balancing apparatus that getting a warrant is an example of.

contravariant 6y ago

I know it's not a popular term in the U.S. but the socialist answer would be that companies serve the public and should therefore make information freely available unless there's a good reason not to. For the same reason companies shouldn't get to keep or distribute information on the very people they're supposed to be serving (unless there's a good reason to). So rather than transparency increasing with power, you could also say that the lack of transparency itself is placing powers in the exact opposite place of where it should be.

clairity 6y ago
that's viewed with skepticism because it presumes, or at least implies, that socialism inherently and structurally solves the transparency problem, but it still requires similar policy to augment the underlying ideology appropriately. there's no free lunch when it comes to some (usually small) proportion of people trying to leverage a system.