Privacy and Transparency within the 4IR: Two faces of the same coin

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is characterized by a fusion of technologies, which is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. In this context, two fundamental characteristics emerge: transparency and privacy. From one side, transparency can be seen as the quality that allows participants of a community to know which particular processes are being applied, by which agents, and on which data items. It is generally regarded as a means to enable checks and balances within this community, so as to provide a basis for trust among its participants. Privacy, on the other side, essentially refers to the right of an individual to control how information about her/him is used by others. The issue of public transparency versus individual privacy has long been discussed, and within already existing 4IR scenarios, it became clear that the free flow of information fostered by transparency efforts poses serious conflicting issues to privacy assurance. In order to deal with the myriad of often conflicting cross-cutting concerns, Internet applications and systems must incorporate adequate mechanisms to ensure compliance of both ethical and legal principles. In this paper, we use the OurPrivacy Framework as a conceptual framework to precisely characterize where in the design process the decisions must be made to handle both transparency and privacy concerns.