Do Honest People Pull the Short Straw?

Widespread acceptance of the value of the culture of openness and honesty in cyberspace, due to the proliferation of (in many cases, ostensibly free) online services such as social media, paradoxically encourages ‘clever’ or ‘crafty’ people to use those services in a closed or controlled fashion to their own advantage. Online services that would motivate such people to exploit ‘honest’ or ‘innocent’ users undermining the open and honest culture have been provided. This situation will lead to social issues, such as the spread of online behaviour that treats others as only a means, the distortion of digital as well as real identities of a wide range of individuals, and human alienation. Nobody except social media platform companies seems to get the benefit from people’s social media usage in the longer term. In this paper, the nature of these issues is examined with referring to actual cases, and measures to address them, such as the establishment of the right to be translucent and the notion of co-ownership of digital objects, are proposed.