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Whenever I ask questions about people's attitude towards privacy they also end up with, I have nothing to hide, and all counter examples are vague and not direc
by ujttpu 10y ago
Whenever I ask questions about people's attitude towards privacy they also end up with, I have nothing to hide, and all counter examples are vague and not directly applicable. I'm working on turning the privacy talk around, to frame it around the loss of freedom, Freedom from criminals, Freedom of relationship, Freedom of self expression, Freedom from profiling. We can then explore which freedoms are relevant to the individual and which are not.
Freedom from criminals: Computer systems are not secure. The more we share online the bigger the danger when the data is leaked. A very real concern that is often overlooked is that governments and companies are incapable of keeping our data secure. By collecting addresses, medical data, bank information we are all exposing ourselves to risks of having our identity, money and medical information stolen or to be held for ransom.
Freedom of relationship: Private conversations can be made public, your opinions and interests can be made public without your intention. For example facebook changing their privacy settings suddenly makes your private links shared, or private matters suddenly appear where you don't intend them to be. Like product adverts showing up at work, sharing our private purchases with colleagues.
Freedom of self expression: We loose control of when content goes public. Suddenly our ideas and works can be shared without our consent or credit even without our knowledge. An art sharing site suddenly uses our work in private folders for advertisements because they now have access to them. When uploading on line we lose control of our data and if they are taken there is little recourse.
Freedom from profiling: Decisions are made about you without your direct input affecting the news you see, the products you are advertised, and the prices you are offered. Governments have started placing us on lists along with real criminals based on where we have been, who we have met, and what we have seen. We have no control of the profile that is made on us and we have no access to it.
We, those worried about privacy, can see the overlaps between the loss of freedoms, but by presenting them in these forms it makes for conversations that continue beyond I have nothing to hide. Depending on who I am talking to I can question into which freedom they are comfortable losing and which they are not.
Personally living in a 1st world country with an stable and amicable democratic government my greatest concerns are freedom from criminals and freedom of self expression.
- tornadoboy55 10y agoJust use Snowdens quote: saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need free speech because you have nothing to say. To be honest, I actually ran a very private setup (Copperhead OS, Protonmail, MacBook with all non-draconian privacy settings turned on) for about 2 years, but in the end I realized I was gaining (almost) nothing compared to just Google's services, and losing a whole lot in terms of ease-of-use and integration. All in all its the same thing with privacy as it is with security: you can create all the good systems in the world, but if its a hassle, you'll run into privacy/security fatigue soon and the whole system becomes moot because you'll be the weakest link and start bypassing your own systems.