Annie Duke, the professional poker player and Rock Paper Scissors tournament winner, has a new internet show. A recent episode included appearances by Rafe Furst and Jason Calacanis, discussing privacy and responsible journalism in the face of the recent WikiLeaks scandals. Furst framed the debate in game-theoretic terms, arguing that transparency is a good thing for society and “leads to good behavior.” Pointing out that we live in a world of imperfect information, Furst said, “In the current context, when there is imperfect information, an imbalance of information is what creates: A. power …. and B. it sort of creates the conditions under which acts can be viewed as either good or bad, responsible/irresponsible.” [%comments]
Transparency vs. Responsible Journalism
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Anyone else see the irony in discussing the merits of transparency with a professional poker player?
Mike B: For a Prisoner’s Dilemma to exist the following inequality must hold:
T > R > P > S
(where “T stands for Temptation to defect, R for Reward for mutual cooperation, P for Punishment for mutual defection and S for Sucker’s payoff.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma)
In a world dominated by privacy and privacy rights (i.e. we all to cooperate keep our secrets secret), the reward for “defecting” (i.e. me telling your secret) is low compared to the punishment I will receive. The equilibrium is that privacy is maintained (as long as leaking cannot be done anonymously, which decouples punishment from the action). Thus there is no dilemma if what we (the players) value is privacy. If we value transparency, then the PD inequality holds. In this case “we” means society.
But in a world where transparency is the norm, the opposite is true. In other words, if we value transparency more than privacy there’s no dilemma, and if we value privacy more than transparency then there is a dilemma.
I argued on the show that that there are more benefits to society and individuals (and corporations and governments) to a transparency norm than a privacy norm. Furthermore, it’s fortunate that this is the case because privacy will be harder and harder to maintain as technology and interconnectedness proliferate, and at some point we will have a de facto transparent society. And once that tipping point is reached, it self-reinforces and becomes the Nash equilibrium.
Bigger picture what I am arguing is as follows. The reason we value privacy so much (and have such strong visceral reactions whenever there is talk about radical transparency) has to do with the de facto privacy rights and privacy milieu modern societies have emerged from, due to the very fact that gaining information without the internet was hard. Someone who didn’t value privacy would be punished, assuming they acted on those values.
In a society where gaining information is easy for everyone and privacy is hard to maintain, you’d expect by my reasoning to see the culture shift towards valuing transparency more than privacy. And here’s a falsifiable prediction that would prove my point: randomly poll people about how strongly they agree with this statement “privacy is a fundamental human right”; I predict you will find that the the answer directly correlates with how much time they spend on the internet or are otherwise “connected” via mobile devices.