The Inevitable Death of Privacy? An Analysis of The Argumentation of Reciprocal Transparency

Following the advent of new Information and Communication Technologies such as smartphones and social networks, the boundaries between what is public and what is private have shifted significantly. While concerns have been expressed by the population regarding the erosion of privacy, as in the case of the Patriot Act or Wikileaks, individuals also deliberately share a lot of personal information online. This has led some thinkers to propose that a “reciprocal transparency”, which would entail a nearly unlimited access to any kind of information for every citizen, might be an alternative to actual privacy laws, which are severely hampered by the pervasiveness of new surveillance technologies. By adopting the approach and the theories of Science and Technology Studies, this research aims at analysing the three cornerstones which underpin the argumentation in favour of transparency. By doing so, it demonstrates that discourses advocating for such transformations rely on the erroneous belief that technology determines social change, on a misconception of privacy, and finally on a utopian vision of transparency. These observations lead to the conclusion that reciprocal transparency is not so much simply a solution to modern ICT-related privacy issues as an ideological view of the world