Via Clay Johnson (whose Information Diet I need to read) I came across danah boyd's talk "Transparency is not enough:"

The key idea:

Transparency is important, but it's not enough to achieve the goals that we attribute to the reasons behind wanting to fight for transparency. So if you're fighting for transparency, you need to understand these three things:

1. Information is power, but interpretation is more powerful;
2. Data taken out of context can have unintended consequences;
3. Transparency alone is not the great equalizer.