E-Government

Electronic government holds the promise of improved government services at reduced costs (National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), but the challenge to fulfilling that promise is not minor. There are lots of tradeoffs to consider here, many of which relate to all electronic services, not just electronic government services.

Let’s take customization for example. People increasingly want customized, personalized services (West, 2008), but they do not necessarily understand what they have to give up to get them – total privacy. How do you maintain your privacy from the system (meaning not identifying who you are) while simultaneously asking the system to be customized for you. This is quite a conundrum. Either the system knows who you are and what your preferences are, thereby enabling personalization, or you remain anonymous. But then, if you are anonymous, the system cannot be personalized to your tastes.

There is also a tradeoff when asking systems to be more interactive and convenient but maintain your privacy. The FAFSA website (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) has been criticized for being a too complicated online process. Right now, students and their parents have to dedicate well over 30 minutes to completing this form online, when most of the information is the same information you have already sent to the IRS when you filed your taxes. Wouldn’t it be great to just click a button when submitting your taxes that says “Send My Tax Information to FAFSA”? I think so, but to do that, we are asking two federal agencies to share our information between them. And there are certainly privacy issues there. Once the IRS is sharing your tax information with FAFSA, it’s not too many steps for them to share it with other federal agencies. How far do we want to go in the name of convenience?

A possible answer lies in the idea of “opting in.” Opting in means each user chooses for himself or herself whether or not to provide the information necessary to personalize the system to his or her preferences. This way, users who wish to maintain their privacy can do so (at the expense of personalized content, of course), and users who wish to reveal some of their identities in exchange for personalization can do that.

References

National Archives and records Administration. (n.d.). E-Government Act of 2002 [Electronic resource]. College Park, MD: The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved February 19, 2009, from http://www.archives.gov/about/laws/egov-act-section-207.html

West, Darrell M. (2008). State and federal electronic government in the United States, 2008. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.