Fixing the misinformation age
EATEN OUT lately? Before your next outing in Boston, you may want to check your restaurant's last health inspection at www.cityofboston.gov/isd/health/mfc/court.asp. You might be surprised to learn that some of Boston's best and priciest restaurants have been cited recently for storing food in warm refrigerators, improper cooking temperatures, storing toxic chemicals near food, and unclean preparation surfaces.
But honestly, what are the chances that you'll use the website before your next night out? Even if you did check, you may have a hard time making sense of the reports. Should you worry that your favorite dining destination was cited for having a substandard water system (code 27-1)? Hard to know unless you happen to be a public health inspector.
Diners are less confused in Los Angeles. Every restaurant in Los Angeles County must post a letter grade in its front window -- A, B, or C -- that reflects the result of its last health inspection. Since this disclosure requirement was started in 1998, many LA restaurants have cleaned up their kitchens and many fewer Angelinos have been hospitalized with food-related poisoning. This tale of two cities' restaurants shows how the right kind of information can help reduce important public risks.
Fortunately, new transparency laws are beginning to require that citizens get that information. They compel companies, politicians, and public and non profit organizations to disclose information that they would often rather keep to themselves and post it where, when, and how people need it. Armed with crucial facts, shoppers, investors, and employees make better choices. Those choices in turn force companies to improve their products and practices.
Nutritional labels, aimed at reducing heart disease and cancer, are a familiar example. Likewise, automobile manufactures must tell us about their cars' fuel economy and crash-worthiness. Schools must tell parents how well their students perform on standardized tests, graduation rates, and teacher qualifications. Companies must report the volumes of toxic chemicals that their factories release into the air, water, and soil. If they are publicly traded, they must also report more than ever about their finances -- including the compensation they provide their top officers.
The problem is that many of these policies don't work. Public transparency is always a political compromise. And in the information wars that accompany each new disclosure requirement, the public often loses. Restaurants lobbied successfully to be exempted from nutritional labeling. Auto safety ratings -- on new-car stickers for the first time in 2008 -- are often missing until halfway through the model year. Information on drinking water contaminants is more than a year old by the time people get it. In most cities, restaurant health inspections remain buried in govern-ment files or complex databases.
For public transparency to be effective, the customer must be king. Full disclosure means providing people with accurate information in an understandable form at the time and place they need it. Walking away from a "C" restaurant is easy. Searching a database or website for restaurant hygiene reports is not.
Solving three problems will make new disclosure laws work better. First, ironically, the information revolution is last to come to the nation's most important public information systems. Imagine being able to get health grades, safety ratings, and other information on your cellphone by just zapping products' bar codes. Technology to provide such timely, individually customized information is well within reach.
Second, it's time for a new idea of what public access to information really means. Information about deadly risks or the way schools, banks, or airlines treat the public is not accessible if it is buried in government files or technical databases. It is not accessible if it is a year old. Access means starting with how people make choices and providing information then and there.
Third, people can pool their knowledge about hospital mistakes, car defects, or school performance just as they pool their views of books, movies, and restaurants on popular websites. Why wait for reluctant companies to report problems to the government when individual patients, customers, and parents can share their experiences with one another right away.
When every day brings complex choices, government officials need to understand that people's attention is a scarce resource and that the public's trust of generic warnings is waning. Individuals can't be blamed for failing to dig through reams of government reports to find out what they should know. It's the government's responsibility to provide that information in a way that is useful for us all.
David Weil and 
