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I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2014)
- fouc 7y agoEdit: oops, can't link directly to pdf :)
- llacb47 7y agoNope
- WarOnPrivacy 7y agoI've got nothing to show, therefore no reason to be surveilled.
- fouc 7y agosaying is showing, showing is saying. You've got nothing to say?
- McDev 7y agoArguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#2015 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#2015
- zsmizzle 7y agoAlso, one of the hardest-hitting quotes from his book, Permanent Record: "There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling." ― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, p. 208 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/71198843-permanent-record https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/71198843-permanent-rec...
- hoseja 7y agoSome people really have no problem revealing those to their "tribe" and it's unfathomable to them that members of their "tribe" would have bad intentions. These people form a large part of the voting population.
- throw0101a 7y agoAdding to that: by giving up your freedom (of X) you may be giving it up for those around you. We interact with people and information about others can be gleaned by what we do. Privacy-conscious people may not use Gmail because they don't like what Google is doing, but if everyone you communicate with has an @gmail.com address, you're being 'compromised' every time you send a message to them.
- lazyguy2 7y agoThe most important thing I've learned from watching Cia and FBI shills being interviewed on CNBC is that in order to preserve our rights we must first be willing to surrender them. Security and privacy are not diametrically opposed concepts. They are directly dependent on one another. You can't have one without the other.
- natch 7y agoThis makes no sense. Both the paragraphs and the sentences contradict each other while repeating cliches from past discussions on this topic. It reads like a markov bot account. You might want to explain what you mean better.
- headsoup 7y agoIf I am to be surveilled anyway, perhaps they can ensure my protection from threats to my privacy? After all I assume they're doing all this for our protection, not to generate crimes?
- jeffdavis 7y ago"I have done nothing wrong" => "I have nothing to hide" iff everyone is good and always will be good in the future and never punish me unless I do something wrong.
- natch 7y agoAnd iff the definition of good will never change.
- bregma 7y agoBut we have always been at war with Eastasia.
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoA problematic assumption, as we're already seeing with the ongoing stream of old-Twitter-post scandals.
- vezycash 7y ago"Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him."
- XorNot 7y agoThis does not make the point you're thinking it does.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 7y agoHow do you know what he is thinking?
- coldtea 7y agoContext of course. Since he posted it in this thread, he should obviously thinks it makes a point relevant to privacy. But the quote is not about privacy. "Give me six lines" just means that anything said/written by someone could be misconstrued against them, not just their private communications. (Of course it would also apply to things communicated in private, and perhaps even more so since one would say even more damning things there. But it's not meant to be a warning about them, but about how anyone can something something that can be used against them, privately or not).
- Koshkin 7y ago> could “Can and will”
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vezycash 7y ago>But it's not meant to be a warning about [private communication], but about how anyone can something something that can be used against them, privately or not Okay, the internet was created for military communications. So, with your logic, you should have a problem with it being used to power eCommerce, pornography, YouTube, Facebook and hacker news. This ain't literature class.
- HNLurker2 7y agoExactly the opposite nihilistic enough that I am waiting to be caught and thrown in prison (deep web sins)
- Mathnerd314 7y agotl;dr NSA surveillance could have chilling effects (no evidence either way) and the author has concerns about oversight and accountability. Pretty unconvincing IMO. The real issue is selective enforcement, e.g. cops who bomb a house to smithereens in pursuit of a suspect but then have sovereign immunity so don't have any consequences. And similarly city officials tend to throw the book of regulations at people they don't like.
- peteradio 7y agoI agree, the information that can be gathered and probably has been gathered would constitute an invalid search/seizure for that information to have been got only a few decades ago. Now the information is there for the taking and so whatever personal power struggle with the government is way under gunned. Any one can be squashed at the whim. And ultimately there needs to be a strong press/codes to air/catch the unjust application of the power.
- numlocked 7y agoDoesn’t look like many are reading the actual article. It sets up the “nothing to hide” argument as the following, which is quite a bit more difficult to rebut: “ Therefore, in a more compelling form than is often expressed in popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument proceeds as follows: The NSA surveillance, data mining, or other government information- gathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Only those who are engaged in illegal activities have a reason to hide this information. Although there may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy. Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information. Cast in this manner, the nothing to hide argument is a formidable one.”
- BLKNSLVR 7y agoI'd like to turn the conversation around and question the prioritization of surveillance of the people over the transparency of politicians' communications, sources of funding, who they're meeting with and all such related activities they perform in a role servicing and paid for by the public. Only once this is addressed should we move down the priority list to "blanket communication and behavioural surveillance of the citizenry." The potential for harm to a country and it's citizens caused by political decisions is exponentially greater than any act by an individual or group with no political power. (and whilst this point is arguable and weighted with emotion, this includes 9/11).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aphextim 7y ago>Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information. No thank you, I'd give up my privacy if it could help prevent heart attacks, cancer or maybe even automobile crashes but terrorism compared to the above pale in comparison when you consider the number of deaths. Literally giving up one of the fundamentals the country was founded on for something so minor is clearly a reach of power for the government to control the population under the guise of keeping them secure. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-vs.-media-coverage.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-i... https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism
- vaporland 7y agoWon't open PDF without me signing up. :-(
- defanor 7y agoI thought it has something to do with JS or referrer, but in a web browser with those it leads to a 404 error page.
- rahuldottech 7y agoDirect link to PDF: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf
- rahuldottech 7y agoA link to direct PDF: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf @dang you might want to edit the URL to this
- mkagenius 7y agoConclusion from the pdf: Whether explicit or not, conceptions of privacy underpin nearly every argument made about privacy, even the common quip “I’ve got nothing to hide.” As I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, understanding privacy as a pluralistic conception reveals that we are often talking past each other when discussing privacy issues. By focusing more specifically on the related problems under the rubric of “privacy,” we can better address each problem rather than ignore or conflate them. The “nothing to hide” argument speaks to some problems, but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised in government surveillance and data mining programs. When engaged with directly, the “nothing to hide” argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the “nothing to hide” argument, in the end, has nothing to say.
- yiyus 7y agoIn my opinion the nothing to hide argument is valid in a personal basis, but not in a policy making basis. I am against the surveillance of citizens in the name of security, and I actively support the EFF in their attempts to stop it, but I do not have a sticker covering my webcam because if someone at NSA is spending his afternoons watching me working, and maybe putting the finger in my nose from time to time, I sincerely don't care.
- natch 7y agoLimiting the conversation to what is seen on a webcam doesn’t come close to covering the scope of what could happen. Let’s say your screen is captured as well. And sometimes that screen will contain personal and private information of friends and family who might care. It is not your call to decide for them whether their information should be put at risk or not by an organization that has proved itself capable of leaking like a sieve. You could argue that your devices contain no names of friends or pictures or contact info or messages of any sort with anyone. OK, but that would be pretty unusual. Saying you don’t care is like driving drunk on an empty road with passengers in the car. You may not care about whether you die, but you have passengers. Your caring about yourself or not isn’t the issue.
- yiyus 7y agoI think you misunderstood my comment (being honest, it was not very well redacted). I do not disagree with anything you said at all, on the contrary. What I mean is precisely that a lack of personal reasons to keep your privacy is not a good reason to not push for privacy policies. I am totally against screen capturing, as I am against surveillance using laptop cameras or phone microphones, or public cameras capturing my face. However, even although I care about this and actively oppose these practices, I don't cover my face when I live my home, for example, and I don't think (some people may disagree) that I should. Of course, once this affect more people, it is not my choice to not care, and I will do everything possible to keep other people privacy.
- leghifla 7y agoThis "nothing to hide" discussions always remind me of this great essay "We should all have something to hide": https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
- axilmar 7y ago"Nothing to hide" does not mean "nothing private". "Nothing to hide" means "no unlawful action". It's another thing alltogether from having private things.
- Merrill 7y agoIt's ironic that the "global electronic village" turns out to be just like a real village -- there's very little privacy.
- karimmaassen 7y agoThe right to privacy is the right to decide what you want to share or not.
- Koshkin 7y agoAnd with whom.
- CryptoPunk 7y agoAccording to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. This is a surprisingly common sentiment in HN when it relates to financial privacy. Laws that criminalize financial privacy, aka KYC/AML laws, are justified with precisely this "nothing to hide" argument geared to money laundering and other financial crimes, and said laws are quite popular with the tech intelligentsia.
- teyc 7y agoSure you have: your SSN, your password, your mother's maiden name, you first pet's name, your relationship with your wife/kids/mother. It's no one else's business.
- credit_guy 7y agoI find this article underwhelming. It does not really build a strong case. I personally, am person about as interesting or uninteresting as a few billion other people in the world, or as a few hundred million people in the United States. Privacy advocates tend to paint a picture like in the movies "Conspiracy Theory" or "Enemy of the State": if you find yourself in the crosshairs of the state, you're in trouble. Well, here's the thing: I'm not Mel Gibson, and I'm not Will Smith. The chance of the state finding my person interesting is fairly reduced. If someone wants to make my life miserable, there are probably a few hundred guys working for Google who can read my every email on my gmail account, and who can probably even impersonate me on the internet. There are scores of other tech guys working in some bank who can see my every bank transaction, or every credit card payment, or engineers at Amazon who can see the history of my purchases. Pretty much only those who don't want can't find my physical address, or my phone number, or other things. Given all that, the fact that the NSA can do all these things too, well I, for one, am not losing a lot of sleep over this.