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This is a wonderful rhetoric, a nice example of eristic dialectic. I love it. It avoids implying the person argued with has a taint, which would make them defen

This is a wonderful rhetoric, a nice example of eristic dialectic. I love it. It avoids implying the person argued with has a taint, which would make them defensive, but instead allows them to pick a straw man from their monkey-sphere and create a vague threat against themselves where the best defense is agreeing with the pro-privacy argumentation. There is one way out: "everyone i know is a saint, and if someone is not, i am a saint and would rather get smeared for acquaintance than protect the devil." but it is unlikely any human will react in this way, because it is almost never true. However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be refuted, not reiterated. Privacy is not about hiding vileness, it was (19th/20th century) about not allowing a totalitarian government to read your private correspondence in search for what they consider dissident opinions. Many people are very lucky that they find this hard to grasp. Privacy has changed, it had to change because of the "data is the new oil" paradigm. 21st century privacy is your right to choose who can process your data for what. Example: You would never agree that your data is processed by an organization with the purpose of changing your opinion to theirs without ever telling you they are engaging you at all. Yet that is happening, it is called microtargeting.

coldtea 7y ago
>However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be refuted, not reiterated. Such a distinction doesn't matter much. Evil is in the eye of the beholder. E.g. for Southern racists in the 50s, the fact that one supported and funded black rights would seem "evil" as well. As long as what X (= you or someone you know) said or did appears evil to third parties (government, society at large, their boss, private interests, etc), and leaking this could have negative consequences against X, that's enough to justify the argument made. Whether the thing is actually evil or good is not really relevant (that implies some fixed moral order for eternity and for everybody within a certain time).
- Jon_Lowtek 7y ago
  I like your explanations of "right to hide something". Thank you. Here in germany the "nothing to hide" argument is mostly used by the spokespeople of the ministry of state security with an implication of crime as defined by the law as written. But let's not focus on the finer points of morality. More important: even if we go from "right to hide some thing evil" to "right to hide some thing" we are not even close to privacy. Because privacy is not about hiding some information about oneself, it is about the right to have some level control about personal information. A level at which almost everyone suddenly understands privacy is sexuality: no matter if you want to keep your sexuality hidden or not, no matter if you publish on pornhub or not, privacy is the right to not be filmed in your bedroom without your consent. Privacy is not about hiding.
Silhouette 7y ago
However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be refuted, not reiterated. I didn't express any view on what someone might want to hide, nor why. I'm simply demonstrating that even if someone feels they have no reason to hide anything themselves, it is still in their interests to value privacy unless every other person who might in some way influence their lives also has no reason to hide anything. You're correct that my argument is an emotional one. I'm appealing to empathy and enlightened self-interest. It's like saying I still support equal rights even if I don't personally belong to some minority group that suffers unjustified discrimination, because I believe a society that treats people fairly is in everyone's best interests, including my own. There are of course many other issues around what privacy means or should mean in the modern world, and how privacy relates to other concepts like anonymity, pseudonymity, confidentiality, data protection rights and data processing rights. I'm not addressing those issues at all here, because they weren't what the headline was about.

coldtea 7y ago

>However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be refuted, not reiterated. Such a distinction doesn't matter much. Evil is in the eye of the beholder. E.g. for Southern racists in the 50s, the fact that one supported and funded black rights would seem "evil" as well. As long as what X (= you or someone you know) said or did appears evil to third parties (government, society at large, their boss, private interests, etc), and leaking this could have negative consequences against X, that's enough to justify the argument made. Whether the thing is actually evil or good is not really relevant (that implies some fixed moral order for eternity and for everybody within a certain time).

Jon_Lowtek 7y ago
I like your explanations of "right to hide something". Thank you. Here in germany the "nothing to hide" argument is mostly used by the spokespeople of the ministry of state security with an implication of crime as defined by the law as written. But let's not focus on the finer points of morality. More important: even if we go from "right to hide some thing evil" to "right to hide some thing" we are not even close to privacy. Because privacy is not about hiding some information about oneself, it is about the right to have some level control about personal information. A level at which almost everyone suddenly understands privacy is sexuality: no matter if you want to keep your sexuality hidden or not, no matter if you publish on pornhub or not, privacy is the right to not be filmed in your bedroom without your consent. Privacy is not about hiding.

Silhouette 7y ago

However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be refuted, not reiterated. I didn't express any view on what someone might want to hide, nor why. I'm simply demonstrating that even if someone feels they have no reason to hide anything themselves, it is still in their interests to value privacy unless every other person who might in some way influence their lives also has no reason to hide anything. You're correct that my argument is an emotional one. I'm appealing to empathy and enlightened self-interest. It's like saying I still support equal rights even if I don't personally belong to some minority group that suffers unjustified discrimination, because I believe a society that treats people fairly is in everyone's best interests, including my own. There are of course many other issues around what privacy means or should mean in the modern world, and how privacy relates to other concepts like anonymity, pseudonymity, confidentiality, data protection rights and data processing rights. I'm not addressing those issues at all here, because they weren't what the headline was about.