I was at a nonprofit I volunteer for, talking over the pros and cons of moving a database they use onto the Internet. As a community organization, they don’t have private or confidential information, but there was still a reluctance (understandable) to put their data “out there.” I reassured them that they’d be able to password-protect their data so it couldn’t be inadvertently modified. But I know that someone sufficiently motivated can always crack anything they want, and I’d certainly never recommend they put anything sensitive out on, say, Google Documents. It’d be like pee in a pool.

It got me thinking of the amount of personal information I have out there. I’ve been online since the early ’90s, have an Amazon account going back over a decade, and I’ve got active and inactive profiles at a number of social networking sites, from Facebook to match.com to LinkedIn. It’d be trivially easy to put together a fairly complete dossier on my political interests, my purchasing habits, my sexual proclivities and my health history. And, yeah… I’m a little creeped out by that, but I’ve pretty much accepted it from before the time I linked my Google account to my old blog. And part of it may be that – having spent my formative young adult years in a communal living situation – I’m used to living under a microscope, and I don’t have that big an issue with people knowing my business.

The fact is, our sphere of privacy is vanishingly small. And the danger lies in the fact that there is less and less accountability of the corporations and governments that possess and control all of this information As security writer Bruce Schneier notes, “those entrusted with our privacy often don’t have much incentive to respect it.”

I used to be an advocate for personal privacy, appending a PGP key to my personal emails and whatnot. Now I find myself moving closer and closer to the Transparent Society vision of British author David Brin: given that personal privacy is increasingly a joke, we must demand similar openness from those who run the show. If there is no one to watch the watchers, then this power will be abused, sure as winter follows autumn.

The up side is that we’ve never had better tools for keeping our governments accountable. The down side, of course, is that our governments have zero interest in being accountable. Even President Transparency is moving to retroactively hide information and prevent anyone from finding out whether they were illegally surveilled.

We’re at a delicate stage of the whole secrecy/transparency curve… in fact, the inflection point is probably well behind us. There is probably still time to reverse the trend… but it will require fairly massive sustained effort.

And in these days of Terror Terror Terror and PATRIOT Acts, the momentum is clearly in the other direction.