[en] Following the advent of new Information and Communication Technologies such as
smartphones and social networks, the boundaries between what is public and what is private
have shifted significantly. While concerns have been expressed by the population regarding
the erosion of privacy, as in the case of the Patriot Act or Wikileaks, individuals also
deliberately share a lot of personal information online. This has led some thinkers to propose
that a “reciprocal transparency”, which would entail a nearly unlimited access to any kind of
information for every citizen, might be an alternative to actual privacy laws, which are
severely hampered by the pervasiveness of new surveillance technologies. By adopting the
approach and the theories of Science and Technology Studies, this research aims at analysing
the three cornerstones which underpin the argumentation in favour of transparency. By doing
so, it demonstrates that discourses advocating for such transformations rely on the erroneous
belief that technology determines social change, on a misconception of privacy, and finally on
a utopian vision of transparency. These observations lead to the conclusion that reciprocal
transparency is not so much simply a solution to modern ICT-related privacy issues as an
ideological view of the world.
