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by WorldMaker 2821 days ago
Sousveillance is a useful goal because it would provide greater opportunity to know when your interests are no longer aligned. Right now a company may publish a privacy policy and say one thing about their interests, but do another and not admit to it. An authority bigger than them might hold them accountable (governments, shareholders), but what if users could be their own watchdogs?

As for compromises, typically the assumptions in Transparency situations is that the damage is mitigated if it was already transparent (everyone already knows, or already has some other way to access that data, so compromise is less of a big deal). Admittedly, there's a lot of cultural hurdles involved to make everything transparent, including "deweaponizing" a lot of people's secrets/getting used to the fact that everyone probably has skeletons in their closet and to stop using that against each other.

I'm not even sure that full transparency could work in the real world [1], but starting from the assumption that privacy is dead anyway, transparency options seem some of the best alternatives to pursue (instead of trying to put all the monsters back into Pandora's box, let's try for hope and compromise).

[1] An interesting argument is that full transparency was the actual state of early tribal humankind. Gossip networks held tribes together. Everyone knew everyone's else's business, just because of human social dynamics and the way that we know tight-knit communities work. From that perspective privacy is a "modern" thing, and possibly even a fluke of modern civilization, though certainly many here would classify it a feature more than a bug.