Beyond Privacy Trade-offs with Structured Transparency
This work aims to improve information governance and collaboration for parties who need to share information but disagree on its usage, offering an incremental conceptual framework.
This paper addresses the 'copy problem' in information sharing, where senders lose control over information use once shared, which often inhibits collaboration. It proposes a five-part framework called 'structured transparency' by combining existing solutions from disconnected fields to improve information flow governability and incentivize collaboration.
Successful collaboration involves sharing information. However, parties may disagree on how the information they need to share should be used. We argue that many of these concerns reduce to 'the copy problem': once a bit of information is copied and shared, the sender can no longer control how the recipient uses it. From the perspective of each collaborator, this presents a dilemma that can inhibit collaboration. The copy problem is often amplified by three related problems which we term the bundling, edit, and recursive enforcement problems. We find that while the copy problem is not solvable, aspects of these amplifying problems have been addressed in a variety of disconnected fields. We observe that combining these efforts could improve the governability of information flows and thereby incentivise collaboration. We propose a five-part framework which groups these efforts into specific capabilities and offers a foundation for their integration into an overarching vision we call "structured transparency". We conclude by surveying an array of use-cases that illustrate the structured transparency principles and their related capabilities.