Product Code Database
Transparency in behavior is a way of acting that makes it easy for others to see what actions are performed. As an ethic that spans science, engineering, business, and the humanities, transparency implies openness, communication, and accountability.
Transparency is practiced in companies, organizations, administrations, and communities. For example, in a business relation, fees are clarified at the outset by a transparent agent, so there are no surprises later. This is opposed to keeping this information hidden which is "non-transparent". A practical example of transparency is also when a cashier makes changes after a point of sale; they offer a transaction record of the items purchased (e.g., a receipt) as well as counting out the customer's change.
In information security, transparency means keeping the arcane, underlying mechanisms hidden so as not to obstruct intended function—an almost opposite sense. It principally refers to security mechanisms that are intentionally undetectable or hidden from view. Examples include hiding utilities and tools which the user does not need to know in order to do their job, like keeping the remote re-authentication operations of Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol hidden from the user.
Regulations in Hong Kong require banks to list their top earners – without naming them – by pay band.
In 2009, the Spanish government for the first time released information on the net worth of each cabinet member, but data on ordinary citizens is private. Currently, elected officials have to disclose their net worth on a yearly basis.
An unwritten norm requires that American politicians release their tax returns, in particular those running for the office of president. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump refused to release them, breaking a 47-year-old custom, but still got elected.
Corporate transparency, a form of radical transparency, is the concept of removing all barriers to—and the facilitating of—free and easy public access to corporate information and the laws, rules, social connivance and processes that facilitate and protect those individuals and corporations that freely join, develop, and improve the process.
In 2025 the Austria Court of Audit argued that mistakes had been made in granting neither Austria's ministry of energy nor regulatory E-Control full access to gas contracts agreed upon between OMV and Russian Gazprom in 2006.
The International NGO Accountability Charter, linked to the Global Reporting Initiative, documents the commitment of its members international NGOs to accountability and transparency, requiring them to submit an annual report, among others. Signed in 2006 by 11 NGOs active in the area of humanitarian rights, the INGO Accountability Charter has been referred to as the "first global accountability charter for the non-profit sector". In 1997, the One World Trust created an NGO Charter, a code of conduct comprising commitment to accountability and transparency.
If the media and the public knows everything that happens in all authorities and county administrations there will be a lot of questions, protests and suggestions coming from media and the public. People who are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions. Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political processes by media and the public. One tool used to increase everyday participation in political processes is freedom of information legislation and requests. Modern democracy builds on such participation of the people and media.
There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the decisions at all levels in society.
When military authorities classify their plans as secret, transparency is absent. This can be seen as either positive or negative; positive because it can increase national security, negative because it can lead to corruption and, in extreme cases, a military dictatorship.
While a liberal democracy can be a plutocracy, where decisions are made behind locked doors and the people have fewer possibilities to influence politics between the elections, a participative democracy is more closely connected to the will of the people. Participative democracy, built on transparency and everyday participation, has been used officially in northern Europe for decades. In the northern European country Sweden, public access to government documents became a law as early as 1766. It has officially been adopted as an ideal to strive for by the rest of EU, leading to measures like freedom of information laws and Lobby register.
To promote transparency in politics, Hans Peter Martin, Paul van Buitenen (Europa Transparant) and Ashley Mote decided to cooperate under the name Platform for Transparency (PfT) in 2005. Similar organizations that promotes transparency are Transparency International and the Sunlight Foundation.
A recent political movement to emerge in conjunction with the demands for transparency is the Pirate Party, a label for a number of political parties across different countries who advocate freedom of information, direct democracy, network neutrality, and the free sharing of knowledge.
Some mathematicians and scientists are critical of using closed source mathematical software such as Mathematica for mathematical proofs, because these do not provide transparency, and thus are not verifiable. Open-source software such as SageMath aims to solve this problem.
In computer security, the debate is ongoing as to the relative merits of the full disclosure of security vulnerabilities, versus a security-by-obscurity approach.
There is a different (perhaps almost opposite) sense of transparency in human-computer interaction, whereby a system after change adheres to its previous external interface as much as possible while changing its internal behaviour. That is, a change in a system is transparent to its users if the change is unnoticeable to them.
Among philosophical and literary works that have examined the idea of transparency are Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish or David Brin's The Transparent Society. The German philosopher and media theorist Byung-Chul Han, in his 2012 work Transparenzgesellschaft, sees transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such as shame, secrecy, and trust. He was criticized for his concepts, as they would suggest corrupt politics, and for referring to the anti-democratic Carl Schmitt.
Anthropologists have long explored ethnographically the relation between revealed and concealed knowledges, and have increasingly taken up the topic in relation to accountability, transparency and conspiracy theories and practices today.Strathern, M. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.Hetherington, K. 2011. Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Todd Sanders and Harry West, for example, suggest not only that realms of the revealed and concealed require each other, but also that transparency in practice produces the very opacities it claims to obviate.Sanders, Todd & Harry G. West 2003. Powers revealed and concealed in the New World Order. In H. G. West & T. Sanders (eds) Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 16.
Clare Birchall, Christina Gaarsten, Mikkel Flyverbom, Emmanuel Alloa and Mark Fenster, among others, write in the vein of "critical transparency studies", which attempts to challenge particular orthodoxies concerning transparency. In an article, Birchall assessed "whether the ascendance of transparency as an ideal limits political thinking, particularly for western socialists and radicals struggling to seize opportunities for change". She argues that the promotion of "datapreneurial" activity through open data initiatives outsources and interrupts the political contract between governed and government. She is concerned that the dominant model of governmental data-driven transparency produces neoliberal subjectivities that reduce the possibility of politics as an arena of dissent between real alternatives. She suggests that the radical left might want to work with and reinvent secrecy as an alternative to neoliberal transparency.
Researchers at the University of Oxford and Warwick Business School found that transparency can also have significant unintended consequences in the field of medical care. Gerry McGivern and Michael D Fischer found "media spectacles" and transparent regulation combined to create "spectacular transparency" which has some perverse effects on doctors' practice and increased defensive behaviour in doctors and their staff. Similarly, in a four-year organizational study, Fischer and Ferlie found that transparency in the context of a clinical risk management can act perversely to undermine ethical behavior, leading to organizational crisis and even collapse.
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