In the current mania for privacy on the Internet, fuelled by Facebook scare-stories and exemplified by 240,000 Germans insisting that their houses be pixelated on Google Earth, we risk losing sight of the value of publicness.

By setting our defaults to ‘private’, we lose the value of the connections the Internet brings: the ability to meet new people, collaborate and capture the wisdom of the crowd.  Openness also helps us to hold the powerful – businesses as well as government - to public account.

This is not to say that we should ignore the importance of personal privacy, but sharing and linking enables innovation and contributes to the public good. When you open up, you invite people to help you improve. This is a key lesson from the open-source movement and it is one the UK government wants to apply. Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office says, ‘Transparency is at the heart of this Government’s agenda. It is also key to our efficiency agenda. By freeing up data for others to reuse, inventive people will be able to build innovative applications and websites which will bring significant economic benefit.’

Jeff Jarvis, the author of What Would Google Do?, the best-selling guide to surviving and prospering in the Internet age, is writing a new book called Public Parts. He argues that open is better than closed and that we all benefit from putting more stuff out there in public.  At a personal level, he is his own case-in-point: blogging about his prostate cancer he got valuable advice from strangers who posted comments and helped form an online support group. And at a public level, this created an archive that will help future patients who happen upon it via cancer-related queries on Google.

Jarvis argues that the key benefits of publicness are that it:

• Makes and improves relationships
• Enables collaboration
• Builds trust
• Provides provenance for ideas and creation
• Enables the wisdom of the crowd
• Organises us (think social networks)
• Creates public value

We can already see that open data is delivering a range of interesting new applications and generating significant public value. It is interesting - and frankly unexpected - to see government leading the way; it will be fascinating if business follows.