Fundamentals:Privacy vs transparency

From TraceFood

Transparency, privacy, and granularity

A basic non-functional issue to be considered is the principle of transparency with respect to traceability. Improved transparency is a key-point for improving traceability with respect to food safety issues as well as quality and origin documentation.

The basic one-down and one-up requirement with respect to traceability of products will mostly expose who are trading with who and to a certain degree which products have been sent and received on a certain granularity level. Documentation of which transformations that have been done inside an actor is thus not exposed, i.e., the documentation of which ingredients and resources that have been used as input to produce an outgoing unit is not visible from the outside. An improvement of Internal traceability can leverage the transparency even though such information is not made visible outside. Selection of which documentation and information to expose about the internal processes is thus an important issue to consider when participating in chain traceability systems.

A too fine-grained exposure of the internal traceability graph showing all internal transformations can be considered as harmful with respect to visibility of recipes and internal production processes. Similarly can a too fine-grained exposure of received and sent traceable units show trading relationships and actual sale. This can be considered harmful with respect to trade negotiations and changes in market, thus influencing stock prices and the value of the company.

A too coarse-grained exposure of internal traceability can on the other hand mean less opportunities for improvement of marketing, logistics, and customer relations.