I agree that Google Transparency Report and cookie alerts are mere baby steps toward accountability. Cookies don't measure activity on mobile or tablets, and increasingly, people are connected on a wide array of devices.

But who or what can instigate radical transparency this point? Privacy advocacy movements ask for data "back" or government regulation such as in Europe. But just as setting up private browsing is inconvenient to users, being transparent is inconvenient to both government and private institutions. Plus even if general users can access large public data sets, most cannot analyze those to get a comprehensive picture of what marketers see about them!

Given this landscape, diffusing the idea of radical transparency (which would certainly usher innovation and new notions of tribes/shame) requires baby steps. You are right…"[accountability] requires far more radical transparency than trusting self-reported data from companies." I argue we can start by ushering in the simpler notion of digital activities as public record. Just like you can't yell fire in a movie theater, you can't take wildly free actions, actions that are illegal in your context, online. Accordingly, users should expect smart fridges to have a "dumb" mode, know the difference, and seriously consider what they are willing to share.

Moreover, the death of privacy wasn't necessarily the death of market competition. If privacy is currency, more people can afford services. For example, individuals who do not have means to start up a business could now use a suite of "free" online tools to put together an e-commerce site, market their services, get paid and analyze their returns.

Finally, predictive policing to recognize criminal behavior or the use face recognition algorithms with surveillance cameras can be erroneously implemented leading to general mistrust. News of NSA collecting and aggregating personal data was huge threat to Americans' personal sense of privacy particularly because the NSA is not tasked with policing, so their activities seemed out of line. This scandal does not cloud the fact that predictive policing is being used in municipalities to prevent crime, and not by taking innocent individuals into custody; rather, "they surface particular times and locations predicted to be associated with an increased likelihood for crime." These tools help police better allocate resources to prevent situations where crime is likely - another pitch for cooperative transparency.

Facebook recently received flack for conducting a social experiment by manipulating newsfeeds with all negative or positive comments to see this shifts' effect on user activity. Privacy advocates worry advertisers and marketers will use such sentiment mining to target consumers at their most vulnerable states. Conversely, security experts use computational linguistic tools to mine chatrooms for terrorist sentiments or activity patterns. The first situation (commercial) seems manipulative and the second (security) retributive. Are these dissimilar? In order for information sharing tools, crowdsourcing, and Web 2.0 platforms to exist, privacy is sacrificed. The onus of protecting speech is on the platform hosts to warn their users. Perhaps ultimately on the USERS of digital tools to exercise discretion.

Attacks on the US gov'ts cyber infrastructures are up to the hundred thousands a year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/ asia/us-accuses-chinas-military-in-cyberattacks.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Initially, the idea of massive amounts of your data - for example your purchase or chat histories - aggregated by marketers and sometimes handed over to the government is a scary, Orwellian thought. But digital spaces and transactions are not entries in a private journal. Digital activities are actions in a public forum. Furthermore, individuals have stood to gain a lot from this transparency. From targeted ads and discounts to customized medical advice and free communication tools - we have traded a certain level of traditional privacy for convenience, and it is now economically unfeasible for most to opt out of this network - to forego daily reliance on Google, CVS rewards, or Priceline.com deals. Digital privacy is dead. Accountability measures such as Google Transparency reports or cookie tracking alerts promoting consumer awareness and civil rights can help guide this new framework for digital transparency.

Social networks connect people over far distances. Family members in different countries can vicariously share in each others lives through social networking platforms that allow video, photo, updates, chat and now talk features all simultaneously. Although the quality and depth of these relationships vary, it is true that some relationships, perhaps first formed when traveling or with family, would just be non-existent if it weren't for social networking.