I heard what Bytemaster had to say and honestly I've spent years thinking about the same issue. There is a book called the transparent society and even a video on total transparency (futurist perspective).
Secrecy is NOT privacyFirst, secrecy is NOT privacy. Privacy is access control while secrecy could mean no one other than yourself can access it. Private information could be what you don't want your wife or parents to know, while secrecy is something only you know. Your inner most thoughts are usually considered secret, while private could be your social security number. Most people don't have much of an ability to keep secrets, and privacy could be your Google search history for the last 10 year,s but you might not be responsible for keeping it private because Google is.
Who opens up first?
The issue isn't so much that humans beings are bad at keeping secrets (even though we are), and the issue isn't a matter of privacy vs security either because in many cases privacy enables security. The question ultimately evolves into who opens up first?
Everyone is going to look pretty bad when every moment of their life is logged and people who hate them are able to pull out of context every ignorant thing they said, every questionable thing they did, etc. The problem with our society and our people which prevents us from having an easy time going into a transparent society is what I call "judgement culture". Human beings like to judge each other on every aspect of life, all the time, with wildly divergent moral or social norms, some of which aren't based on anything other than fear, or some other emotion.
Who opens up first?Again who opens up first? People in authority in my opinion have a reason to be transparent, but for people who don't have any authority over anyone, who aren't in any sort of position of trust, it's not the same. When you give everyone access to everyone's information then you're expecting or requiring everyone become responsible with information and as we know the majority of humans aren't. A lot of humans abuse information which does not belong to them, using it as a weapon, and the term "information warfare" evolves from that.
How do we make the transition without violence?So the problem is ultimately the transition. There is no easy transition to a transparent society. The other problem is how transparent do you want to go? For some people they would agree to a society where everyone can read each other's thoughts and scan the inside of each other's bodies. If society is totally transparent then eventually your thoughts will not be private, and that is the logical outcome of the transparent society that isn't promoted in books. Once privacy is lost you can't get it back, it's just gone, and many people alive today would rather die than give up their ability to have private thoughts and feelings.
Humans are currently too ignorant, irrational, and psychologically confused to handle transparencyI'm not a person who believes that the current group of people are rational enough, or psychologically capable, of handling a transparent society. It's sort of like the power the church had back in the day, giving that power back to the general public again, but the problem here is people will likely seek to police each other's thoughts and actions, until no individuality is left. We see it now with "political correctness", "censorship", and etiquette, and we will see even more of it if we immediately transition to total transparency. The witch hunts will become the main focus of society because people tend to do that when they know too much too soon.
The small town analogy doesn't work because what people who use that analogy aren't realizing is that the mind is the only real border in the digital world. In a small town where everyone is made to live the same, the small town becomes the mind, the hive mind will ultimately be what society becomes. I don't think most people who push for the transparent society understand that the outcome will be a bunch of hive minds, not unlikely the borg, or the ultimate communes, arranged by algorithm.
At the same time I've also come to recognize that these are trends and the total transparency trend is winning out over the privacy trend. It is likely that in 2025 or sooner, we will have a total surveillance society as in the Youtube video, and when you also add in sousveillence, AI and BCI (brain to computer interface), eventually not even thoughts will be private unless humans reverse the trend.
My own current solution to the problem is, in my opinion we are not going to be human anymore once this is over. We should embrace transhumanism, and do everything we can to brace for impact of technology, we should redefine "human" as we learn more about ourselves, and we should seek to swap "human judges" with either cyborgs or AI. Cyborg judges would be humans augmented with abilities to make wise, sapient decisions, with enhanced rationality and objectivity. This trend is already in motion, as doctors already use machine intelligence to help diagnose people, but as humans become more transparent I do not think the human brain will be capable of handling all that information and either algorithms will have to assist humans to make decisions, or we will have situations where groups like ISIS or religious morality inform human judgement, which should scare anyone who is seeing a trend toward transparency.
Total surveillance society video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjwzhPkzfp0The Transparent Society: Secrecy vs. Privacy, Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0AX79lT4_cThe Transparent Society: Secrecy vs. Privacy, Part 2:
https://youtu.be/8oz2CZgrm8kMoral panic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic