In all the stuff I’ve seen Johanna write about Naked, I’ve never seen her write something bad, presumably because she thought I or another colleague might see it. I almost didn’t put my college graduation year on my LinkedIn profile because I didn’t want people to judge my level of experience (or lack thereof). Claire and I debated about whether to put a video of my baby daughter on YouTube — what if predators saw it?

The question (again) is one of transparency. Whether talking about our own personal lives or about businesses and products, pretty much everyone agrees that there is value in being transparent. Naked tends to advocate transparency at any and every business juncture — it’s the way we work ourselves, and we find that the plusses ultimately outweigh the minuses. Take the CEO of Redfin (thanks for the link, Noah), for example, who blogs all the gory details, good and bad, of every business decision he makes. And his company has become a wild success as a result.

Transparency is cost of entry these days. But should we ever draw the line on what we share and what we keep to ourselves? Does transparency ever become a liability?

If I ever published my social security number and my bank account number, then I would be in serious trouble. That’s an obvious one… A little closer to reality, maybe putting my daughter online won’t prove to be the best idea. Or maybe one day a client will calculate my age from my graduation year and dismiss something I’m trying to sell because they think I’m too old or too young.

I can imagine trying to develop a new product at, say, a packaged good company. Should we tell consumers about it, or even involve them in the creation of that new product? Conventional wisdom these days says yes — consumer participation is paramount. But if that product is one that relies on constant innovation and new feature sets to retain or gain market share (pick one of many packaged good categories), maybe it’s not the best idea to let the competition know about the next new great innovation, for fear of cannibalization.

Or the opposite, maybe opening up the R&D process for consumer participation results in a tidal wave of opinion. Because we need to sift through the comments, the new product is slower to come to market and we miss out on potential sales. Or too many opinions in the development process dilutes the potency of the new product — it doesn’t sell because it’s too bland. I don’t know of any examples of this, but I imagine that case studies must exist.

Now, I don’t think anyone can ever rightly advocate being totally opaque, either in life or in business. But at the same time I think we should take a hard look at the limits of transparency and make sure its promise is all its cracked up to be.