Contribution to the handbook
Supporting · Assessed 2026-10-27
This offers useful conceptual framing that can prevent conflating privacy-related hiddenness with political concerns about participation and understanding. It provides background rather than a specific governance mechanism.
Does this challenge the goal?
In-scope gap
Distinguishing hiddenness from opacity can clarify separate risks within the existing governance goal; the question does not contest that goal or its boundaries.
The evidence distinguishes privacy and personal-information concerns from participation and understanding concerns, but does not establish that these concerns never overlap in practice.
Why this category?
- useful conceptual background
- risk distinction
The source interpretations share a source root; their repetition is not independent evidence.
This is an AI assessment of contribution to the goal, separate from whether the question has an answer.
Authority, accountability and resilience →
Read the exploration goalDistinguish the reasons the author gives for worrying about hiddenness from those for worrying about opacity.
What we can say so far
Danaher distinguishes the concerns by both their subject and their underlying value. Hiddenness concerns whether people know that data is being collected or used, and is grounded in privacy and control over personal information. Opacity concerns whether people can understand how algorithmic decisions are reached; its deeper concern is that people may be unable to scrutinize decisions, participate meaningfully in public procedures, or regard those procedures as legitimate. The author therefore treats opacity as potentially as serious as, or more serious than, hiddenness. These are related but distinct concerns; the supplied account does not establish that they never overlap.
What remains open
- The supplied material does not establish the prevalence or practical effects of hiddenness or opacity; those empirical questions are outside this source-position obligation.
Conditions and limits
- This is an account of the author's position as represented in the supplied readable author-manuscript material, not independent new evidence.
- The author connects hiddenness with privacy and control over personal information, and opacity with understanding and political participation; the materials also describe hiddenness in terms of data collection and use.
- The author's account does not establish that hiddenness and opacity never overlap, or measure how often either concern occurs.
Evidence and related ideas
Supporting evidence, qualifications and context play different roles in this answer.
supports
Understanding may be the deeper problem Danaher says difficulty understanding how an algorithm shapes a decision may be as serious as, or more serious than, the fact that its role is hidden. He uses opacity to mean that people may find a process hard to understand through human reasoning.
States that difficulty understanding an algorithmic process may be as serious as or more serious than its hidden role, clarifying the relative importance the author assigns to opacity.
The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation
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