Avoiding the Hypocrisy of Transparency

03 Aug 2010 – Thomas Singer

We advise our clients to be transparent with all they do and touch – in their reporting, their operations, marketing, and even their supply chain. And many companies have embraced this openness and become leaders in incorporating transparency into their business.

What’s more, we are increasingly seeing examples of companies linking transparency with sustainability. Timberland opted for greater transparency when it replaced its annual sustainability report with quarterly corporate social responsibility updates. Nike and Best Buy teamed up with Creative Commons to establish the GreenXchange, a patent commons based on open innovation. Previously this type of collaboration would have been seen as counterintuitive, a sort of competitive disadvantage. At the same time, companies are opening their avenues of communication with consumers – evident by the numerous Twitter and Facebook links found on almost all large company websites.

When consumers are asked to be transparent, and open-up their lives to the world, however, suddenly ‘transparency’ sounds like a bad, dirty word. Images of “Big Brother” begin to appear. Consumer transparency requires replacing some brick walls with glass doors, and this can be an uncomfortable process. While we’d like Facebook to be transparent about how it conducts its business (its hiring practices, its company ethics, the sustainability of its suppliers, its total GHG emissions from data centers, etc.), we get a bit uncomfortable when Facebook turns the same question back on us. Every time a word from the Facebook Privacy Policy is changed, the world (ok, just the 500 million users) pauses for a second to consider whether they are ready to remove one more brick from that wall.

And it’s not just Facebook. Smart meters, designed to help consumers monitor home energy usage to improve their energy efficiency and reduce costs, are facing a similar backlash from some individuals. How dare a company use a smart meter in my home to track my energy usage? Who knows what they will do with all that data on how long my TV has been on standby?

I’m certainly not advocating for a restriction of our privacy rights (after all, I am one of those people who pauses for a second when Facebook updates its privacy policy). There is a place for privacy and good reasons for it too. The key issue at play here is about avoiding hypocrisy.

We encourage corporations and governments to be more transparent because we are their stakeholders – we buy their products and elect them to power. We crave information, knowledge, and the power that they bring – so we ask for it. But why should we, the individual, be more transparent and share our information? Who are our stakeholders?

I would argue we are each other’s stakeholders, and that a certain level of information sharing is crucial for our sustainability progress as a society. Each of us carries a wealth of data (whether we know it or not) that when combined can lead to powerful insights. These are insights that can help each of us become more efficient, productive, healthier, and informed – and when you multiply that by 6.7 billion people it really begins to get interesting.

As sustainability consultants we are advocates for corporate transparency, and we should be no less committed to consumer transparency as well. The trick is to find the right balance between transparency and privacy – opening up enough so that we can contribute to our progress while remaining confident that we are still the ones in control.