The Age of Technological Transparency

endychavez writes "Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley. In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down." From the article: "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun's blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It's a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not."

Comments

Lessons Learned?

[Kadin2048]

There's a certain amount of irony in that the issue which gets the folks in Congress interested in technology, is watching one of their own get busted because he didn't understand that what he was sending over the "tubes" could be saved at either end.

I guess if you can't convince them that "knowledge is power," maybe we should work on "knowledge is not getting indicted."

Re:Lessons Learned?

[wickedsteve]

So those tubes are transperant tubes, eh?

Oh Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean all those chat room transcripts where I posed as an eighteen year-old 5'4" 110lb blonde cheerleader on AOL back in 1995 are still out there somewhere. . .?

Re:Oh Crap

[Aqua_boy17]

That...was you???

The chickens have returned home to roost

[Travoltus]

The Republicans have spent so much time destroying our privacy and installing their surveillance state and now they have fallen victim to their own monster.

I suspect they will be huge champions of privacy after this.

Re:The chickens have returned home to roost

[advocate_one]

Have you seen how Fox news is reporting on the Foley incident??? they're effectively claiming that he's a Democrat!!!

To illustrate your point

[megaditto]

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in the cases of oral-genital intimacy unless it has in some way obstructed the interstate commerce.

J. Edgar Hoover

Re:Electronic trail

[Knuckles]

I'm just not interested in discussing how those pants make her butt look

So you have a website about you wife's butt? You were talking about your browser history ...