19 ms·

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a b

by apeace 6y ago

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're just having a conversation. But the conversation used to be private--that's normal. Now it's not private, which is not normal. Whether or not you feel like you have to "hide" anything during a bar conversation is not the point. It's whether you think we should make changes to our society where having a private conversation is never allowed. This kind of analogy, in my experience, helps people understand that the "nothing to hide" argument assumes that privacy is only for evil people, when in reality it's the very normal default of daily life. The parable posted in another top-level comment is also great.

cgrealy 6y ago
If someone says they have nothing to hide, just say “cool, how much do you earn?” Or if you can do it with a straight face “when was the last time you masturbated?” :)
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  12 minutes ago, why do you ask? :P But income is definitely something that people love to hide. There's a lot of things that all people would love to keep quiet, mostly because their friends or loved ones would find out and may disown them
sixhobbits 6y ago
not sure who to attribute but I like the "privacy is not secrecy. You close the door to the toilet even though we all know what you're doing in there"
cortic 6y ago
My nothing to hide argument is a little different; Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems.. we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
- el_dev_hell 6y ago
  I like this argument. My normal response to "I have nothing to hide" is: "Cool, can I take a look at your browser search/reddit history?".
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    That argument doesn't work because some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable to anyone they know or work for. (This is impossible when you know or work for diverse groups, but inside of a monoculture it's possible.)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - felipemnoa 6y ago
      I don't buy it. We all do things that although not wrong we still wouldn't like to share with anyone. i.e. No person wants to be seen picking their nose, although everybody does it.
      - cgriswald 6y ago
        If someone believes they wouldn't mind being seen picking their nose, it doesn't matter whether they are correct in that assessment. You won't convince them using such an argument because they won't agree with your premise even though you're right.
        searchableguy 6y ago
        I doubt most of them will agree to me seeing what they do inside bathroom.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      > some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable In this time and age, I find that highly doubtful.
kulahan 6y ago
The best argument I ever heard was: "Would you give up your right to free speech just because you have nothing important to say? No? Then why would you give up your right to privacy just because you have nothing to hide?"
- jason0597 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, it was Edward Snowden who said this.
  - kulahan 6y ago
    That's correct!
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  I like that. It raises the important point: of course you don't care about privacy now while you have nothing to hide. You should care about it because one day you might. It might be a stalker, a corrupt government official or policeman, someone at work who is competitive with you, you might be a whistleblower or learn a family secret that would damage your reputation (lets say, your father is a pedophile) .... all these things happen to completely "regular" people who until that point had "nothing to hide" and they end up needing or wishing to hide them in at least some circumstances.
- old-gregg 6y ago
  While I fully support strong privacy & encryption, there is absolutely no logic in this argument because it tries to build upon an unrelated hypothetical. A stronger argument should have tried to explain how this violates the constitution: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    The logic used here is argument by analogy. Talking about the constitution would be a different argument.
thelittleone 6y ago
Another argument is that a conversation we are having today (nothing to hide and between friends) may be used against us in the future. It could also be used against your children.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I'm stealing your analogy but I'm also ready for people to smugly proclaim that they would have no issue with livestreaming their entire life since they have nothing to hide.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lkxijlewlf 6y ago
  Or worse, the one's who smugly say you have no expectation of privacy while in public anyway.
- apeace 6y ago
  That’s the best part. Remind them that it’s not about you. It’s about whistleblowers and journalists who need to protect their sources, and lawyers who need to communicate with their clients. That tends to bring the ego down a peg ;) But honestly, it’s best not to be aggressive. Some people don’t care much, and you won’t convince them. FWIW, all my non-technical friends use Signal with me, and they know about verifying safety numbers! It can be done.
  - lkxijlewlf 6y ago
    > ... It’s about whistleblowers and journalists They'll say the media is the enemy and whistleblowers are traitors who should be shot on site. I'm not even kidding; they'll say this.
    - smegger001 6y ago
      Have you been to my family reunion because I think that may constitute a direct quote. Of course four years ago they espoused the opposite standpoint toward whistle-blowers because obviously the other-side was bad-wrong and this administration is right-good.
  - fiblye 6y ago
    People who actually think this is fine tend to hate journalists and especially lawyers. They might walk away thinking this is a great idea.
newfeatureok 6y ago
I'm not really sure this is a good argument at all. In your scenario, if the two people have nothing to hide why would they care? You're better of appealing to things that they normally might want to hide, like an embarrassing act or things that are said that are questionable out of context, etc. A person who truly has nothing to hide, by definition, would not care about privacy. The entire point of privacy is that there are things that we do not want to share, for whatever reason.
- apeace 6y ago
  People tend to feel attacked when you argue that they do, in fact, have something to hide. Even when you come from the perspective that everyone has something to hide, mostly small things. I've had the best success with the argument I posted. It helps people understand that privacy isn't "hiding", it's normal. What's not normal is guaranteeing your government can see everything you do all the time, and we should think about whether that's what we want.
  - lovelyviking 6y ago
    Actually it reveals a twist in those in favour of surveillance . What they do they falsely accuse you of 'hiding' while you simply naturally expected not to be invaded. They invade you and then they they kind of ask you what is the problem? you have something to hide? And some people say : Oh, we have nothing to hide. But the problem is the fact of invasion, not wether they have to hide something or not. It's like someone invades your territory or takes your stuff and you say, oh, i don't really need those. It's not the problem wether you need those or not. The problem is that you can't decide about it anymore, you right to decide was taken away. In case of property you loose right to private property. In case of free speech you loose your right for free speech. In case of privacy you loose your right choose not to be watched. You loose ability to decide to be private if you wish. That is the problem.
grawprog 6y ago
>here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Personally I like to just remind people if we had nothing to hide, nobody would wear clothing, own curtains, or care about peeping toms.
- serf 6y ago
  >Personally I like to just remind people if we had nothing to hide, nobody would wear clothing, you must live in a nice climate.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Nah, I live in bc, but I mean we do have a nudist beach here that's pretty popular like 2 months a year.
godelski 6y ago
I mentioned something about this yesterday in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693298 Basically it isn't about having anything to hide but the instability of democracy and what power bad actors have. Do I have anything to hide from Google? Not really. But do I want that same data that Google has to be in the hands of someone like Putin? No. I don't even want it in the hands of the NSA. The issue is that if we say that ads can manipulate people to buy things, why can't they manipulate people to do things like vote or divide. Russia's strategy since the Cold War has been to divide and prod The West, to sow disruption. That disruption has caused consolidation of power but also makes it difficult for coalitions to get things done. It is clear that anger generates more clicks, so why is it unrealistic to think bad actors can use that data to better divide us and sow discontent? The next factor is that democracy relies on a distribution of power. Data collection is a means to consolidate power. There's the term "turnkey tyranny" that's thrown around. The reason isn't because we think a tyrant is going to come to power and destroy our way of life, but rather that we recognize that such a thing is possible and want to ensure that such actions would be infeasible if a malicious actor gained power. In democracy power is distributed. This has pros and cons. But the point of distribution is so that consolidation is difficult and we can never have a monarch or tyrant. So it has never been about having something to hide (which btw, do people know they are referencing Goebbels?), but about stability in democracy. Distribution of power that was inherent to the system in the past is no longer built in. Technology has changed and enabled things we never previously imagined.
- dcow 6y ago
  Sadly I've come to the conclusion that people don't really actually care about the stability of democracy so long as they have food on the table and a warm bed at night. No matter the fact that a stable democracy free from the tyrannical rule of a monarch is what gave rise to their entire lifestyle as they know it. But people forget so quickly what we sacrifice for democracy. It's almost irrelevant, though. Our once pristine western democracy has been slowly eroded by the forces free markets. So I don't know who's crazier, the people who seem to care less about the values required to maintain a democracy, or the people who still think we participate in one...
jrumbut 6y ago
I think the key here isn't broadcasting, it's storage. In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. Your conversations were recorded, the data leaked to or purchased by a fly by night company hired by your bank, and now suddenly despite your excellent credit history you can't get a 30 year mortgage, you try to find a new job but companies are only offering 6 month contracts, etc. It's hard to prove a database doesn't exist, better to encrypt the content beforehand and make it harder to create.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. We probably won't.
  - beckingz 6y ago
    Want to see if we can get 10M in VC money to try?
  - cgriswald 6y ago
    Whether it works is irrelevant. If anyone buys it, the time between belief and disbelief will be longer than the time it takes to screw up individuals' lives.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    We're[1] already doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3OrRsLq-eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3OrRsLq-eg [1] someone, not me; "Cognito is a keylogger that tracks typing metrics, analyzes them with AI to diagnose Parkinson's"
- tribeca18 6y ago
  Oddly specific, but this is such a great plausible example that I'm going to use from now on.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
shay_ker 6y ago
I like the speeding analogy. "I have nothing to hide" "Have you ever sped on the highway?" "Well, yes" "Imagine if the government reveals it's been tracking everyone's speed, and has decided to write everyone tickets for speeding." "That's insane, the government can't do that!" "Exactly"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- esrauch 6y ago
  I don't know, tracking everyone's speed to issue tickets doesn't sound nearly as bad as having a recording of 100% of all remote conversations.
  - tintor 6y ago
    Speed with location, as speed limit depends on where you are driving, which is tracking of your movement.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    What if they issue retroactive speeding tickets all at once for the last 10 years?
    - esrauch 6y ago
      I mean, up to the legal statute of limitations they can do that right (eg if they had speed camera recordings that they realized were accidentally unreviewed, they could use those and issue tickets without it being much of a morality issue). It is maybe unfair because of a sudden burden and no ability to change your behavior before it added up to a huge sum, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with privacy.
    - jcwayne 6y ago
      With failure to pay eventually landing you in jail.
- 6y ago
arafa 6y ago
I like to tell people about programs like "LOVEINT" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT). Where there is personal information available to others, it can and will be abused in ways you won't approve of. Privacy might seem like an abstract concern until you or someone you know is being stalked, etc.
andrepd 6y ago
There's other ways. Ask them for their passwords, ask them to hand their phone and riffle through their conversations and photos. If I know they won't be offended them I'll ask them to send me nudes or if they would let me put a camera in their shower. After all, if you're have nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, so why should you close your shower curtain?
- kelnos 6y ago
  > why should you close your shower curtain? Because otherwise you get water all over your bathroom floor?
manfredo 6y ago
While this is on the right track, one would point out that these conversations wouldn't be public they would only be visible to government authorities. I think the due process argument is more compelling. Part of preventing abuses and corruption by law enforcement is ensuring they can only surveil people with reasonable suspicion. Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. But it's crucial that this gets approval from the courts to prevent agencies from snooping on people not for law enforcement but to gain leverage and power. Your privacy helps us prevent the next J Edgar Hoover even if you have nothing to hide.
- lovelyviking 6y ago
  >Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. When I read this as you put it . It comes to me something we tend to forget that surveillance is a form of attack on a person's freedom obviously. The fact of it presence is already an insult actually.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
_AzMoo 6y ago
For those who aren't convinced by this argument, you can take it a little further by introducing a hypothetical situation in which their political opponents obtain power and criminalise criticism of government or other powerful "common-good" entities. Now your recorded conversations could become evidence of sedition, and even if it wasn't criminal at the time it could certainly be used to show evidence of previous behaviour.
nopeNopeNooope 6y ago
This is better: "Cool, call your girlfriend while I listen to you two having phone sex. Right now. You have nothing to hide right? Let's hear it. I can turn around if that makes it easier, so you don't have to see my face. Come on then, you've got nothing to hide right? Should I call her and see if she's game since you're chicken?"
jay_kyburz 6y ago
I think this misses the point. When people say "nothing to hide" they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_. I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships. We need privacy because if ever laws are passed that we don't agree with, we need to be able to break them until we can have the law changed. For example, if it was against the law to be a pro-democracy protestor.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > When people say "nothing to hide" they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_. I don't think so. I think people simply mean they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in all of their personal activities. There are lots of things I say and do that law enforcement would not be interested in at all, but that I still want to keep private, simply because I want to. I shouldn't have to give a reason; privacy should be the default. People who genuinely want to share every little detail of their personal lives already have Facebook.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
  > I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships. What bizarro alternate reality do you live in where this is the case?
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    I don't know, but its scary here. Police march the streets firing rubber bullets into crowds. A leader who makes repeated and sustained attacks to discredit the media with the deliberate intention of having a population with no trusted or reliable sources of information. Foreign interference in elections. Oh yeah, and laws that ban encryption.
- jejeyyy77 6y ago
  The funny thing is, the reason I support surveillance and legislation against encrypted messaging (or at least a backdoor for law enforcement) is extremist groups like ANTIFA
lr4444lr 6y ago
Most people implicitly mean, "nothing unlawful to hide" when they say that, I think.
- suizi 6y ago
  What if the government decides protesting is unlawful?
EGreg 6y ago
The police should wear body cams all the time, and we can end qualified immunity Got nothing to hide and there will be no problem, right?
Nition 6y ago
I saved a link to this post a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli... I won't try and summarise it because I think I'd do a disservice to it, but it's another really good argument, ostensibly from experience, re corrupt countries and surveillance.
quadrifoliate 6y ago
In the US, this argument is even easier to debunk, especially when it comes from middle-class adults who've been working for a while. "I have nothing to hide" "What's your salary and your spouse's salary?" The huge amount of secrecy around salaries in the US is proof that a lot of people have perfectly innocuous secrets that they very much like to hide.
- jejeyyy77 6y ago
  The IRS already knows that information... The question is not whether you have anything to hide, it’s about whether you have anything to hide from law enforcement. HUGE diffeeence.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Unless this bill's critics are mistaken, if your friends are using "file encryption", i.e, encrypting the contents of the communications themselves before sending, then this bill has no effect on that. IMO, your friends, unless they are nerds, are never going to place much value on encryption when they never actually use it themselves. When some third party tech company is doing the "end-to-end encryption" for them then your friends are really not in control of the situation, let alone having any reason to understand it. It could be a sham and they might not know it. This bill stands to hurt tech companies but according to its critics (surprise: it's the tech companies) it does not interfere with any individual's use of encryption for communications. No one wants third parties to have potential access their communications. However there is no law preventing a tech company that provides "encrypted messaging" from decrypting people's communications. There is not even a contract with users. If they do this, their liability is zero. There are only "promises", something like, "We promise we won't do it, unless we receive a valid subpoena" or "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages." (Nevermind metadata.) Well, what if some other third party, like the people pushing this bill, made the same promises? Would that be "good enough"? Of course not. For the record, I am not taking a for/against position here. I am not a tech company nor someone trying to get access to encrypted messaging services provided by tech companies. However if something came along -- not suggesting this is it -- that created the necessary evolutionary pressure to make every person, not just "bad guys", have a basic understanding of how to encrypt a file and send it over an insecure network, without relying on a third party for the encryption, then I would think that would be a good thing.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages." That one's not actually a "promise"; it's either true and sufficient (although it's hard to imagine how if the software supports automatic updates), or a direct lie because they have not in fact made it impossible.
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    Seems like it is impossible to verify whether it is true because we cannot see exactly what they are doing. We are just taking their word for it. It can be nothing more than a "promise" because we are not the ones responsible for carrying out the encryption. We have to trust both (a) the encryption software, which we can examine, and (b) the third person doing the encryption, who is unfortunately operating outside our view. Even if the third person is trustworthy, if they make a mistake, they are not liable for anything. They are not even obligated to tell us they made a mistake. Usually when we trust people to do something important for us, we have some recourse against them if things go south. It is more than just a promise. They have skin in the game.
standardUser 6y ago
The "nothing to hide" argument is so old and easily debunk-able, I don't take seriously anyone who offers it up at this point.
- lovelyviking 6y ago
  >easily debunk-able, I don't take seriously anyone who offers it up at this point. I also do not take such person seriously but if I wish to convince such person I need a good argument that works. If it's easy debunk-able for you I would be interested to see a few from you.
treis 6y ago
This is a terrible analogy. What's actually happening is that Facebook, Google, et.al. can read your messages and the Government can do so with a warrant. Nobody is planning on broadcasting everything to everyone. We don't have to ask people if they would do that or not. The vast majority of them do that today.
mindfulhack 6y ago
Humans need privacy because of the selfishness of our survival biology. There simply are bad people in the world, and I wish it were different, but it's not. 'Just trust us' are words often told to us by people who only want power - at our expense. The best sentiment I've ever heard about privacy is from Shoshana Zuboff, and it's now influenced my thoughts. It's at the end of her amazing 2018 book 'Surveillance Capitalism', the best book on tech I have ever read. She shares a conclusion along this line: To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity. She explains that there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. We need freedom of diversity - to will - to decide for ourselves. Otherwise, and now I conclude, bad actors with power lust will only bend the world to their vision. The guilt-tripping words of "nothing to hide" come from a place of privilege - or worse, hypocrisy. It is an insult to anyone who is different from the norm, and who wants to be themselves. What you have every right to hide does not even have to be illegal, but often it is, like LGBTQ people last century. Illegal ≠ immoral. Privacy is a core freedom to protect human diversity. It must not be shamed. It must be loved. Cherished. Treasured. Privacy begets diversity. Surveillance begets conformity. Which one is more important for the development of life in the universe? As a child, I instinctively knew that privacy was something natural and important in life. Now as an adult, with education and intellect I can articulate why - and resist psychological manipulation and intellectual dishonesty from others trying to tell us that privacy should die. I'm able to see the insanity of my own age. And I will guard privacy with my life on the street, if I have to.
- lovelyviking 6y ago
  > To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity. >there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. I would agree. Those are very important points. When people being watched they are not as free as they could be in their actions and exploration of ideas, because they measure what to say and what is forbidden to say. This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity domain.
  - mindfulhack 6y ago
    > This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity domain. If this is true, then Apple's privacy brand has some long-term legs and some pretty powerful ads in their future - showing creators not being tracked while they freely, privately explore their art on an Apple device.
Rapzid 6y ago
Having a conversation in a bar thinking it's private.. Anyway, it might at well be Pleasantville 1950s for a lot of people. They are both hiding everything and being suspicious AF of anybody with something to hide.
lovelyviking 6y ago
May be a good argument would be that it's not about 'nothing to hide' it's about your authority to decide wether you wish something to hide or not.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. If we are doing imaginary situations, the proponents of this bill can also do something like this: Imagine there is a bar, where the police are unable to go inside. Every day, people go into the bar to plan terror attacks or to spread hate and racism. They can have whoever from across the world join them in the private bar without the police being able to find out. Sometimes they also bring young children into the bar to sexually exploit them. Other times, they bring vulnerable young men and indoctrinate them with their racist hate. The owner of the bar knows that those kinds of things are happening, but they say, a lot of people just come into the bar to talk with friends, so we never allow the police to come. In addition, before serving drinks, the owner puts on a blindfold and stuffs their ears with cotton so they won't be able to see or hear what is going on. They live by the principle: See no evil, hear no evil. The owner of the bar is making a lot of money from the people using the bar. Don't you think we should keep the terrorists, and neo-Nazis, and child molesters from having a bar that they can go to to do and plan their evil stuff that police cannot get to? Don't you think that the bar owners, instead of stuffing their ears and covering their eyes so they are unable to see the bad stuff, should make sure that bad people aren't using their bar for evil stuff. Sure, just like in the real world, you will have your privacy just like you have in your home or at the local bar. But, you would want a real life bar owner to not close their eyes to people using their bar as a planning ground for terrorism, or who are bringing young kids with fake id's to the bar to exploit them, or who are filling young men's minds with hateful, racist lies? Also, just like the police can get a search warrant for a bad person's home or a bar where a lot of bad people are congregating and planning and doing bad things, we think they should also be allowed to do that in the online world. Now tell me, to the average non-tech voter, which will pull the most emotional strings?
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  So now, the terrorists and child molesters still use the bar, but they always go into the bathroom to talk. The owner suspects that they are talking about bad things in there, and installs surveillance cameras so that if the police ever need to know what's happening in there, they have access. Would you want a real life bar owner to record you on the toilet just so that one day the police can track some bad guys easily? Probably not. Do you think it's reasonable to expect privacy on the toilet even when you're in a bar owned by someone else? Yes, even if it might one day make law enforcement a little harder. And just like we think that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using places intended for that in the real world, we think they should also have it online.
sameerds 6y ago
You could move that a notch up and say that only the owner of the bar and their friends get to watch all these conversations and they keep copies. That should really freak out some people.
metta2uall 6y ago
But YouTube Live is publicly accessible, it's not the same as a law enforcement warrant. I think a better analogy is whether it should be okay for a judge to allow police officers to storm into your private residence with only a few seconds warning, and then proceed to examine and even take away anything in your room.
- antoncohen 6y ago
  No, because when police have a search warrant and storm your home, they can't seize the private conversation you had in bed with your partner a year earlier. They can't suck the memories out of your head. Technology like mobile phones and messaging have become an extension of us, they are used for private conversations and personal memories. Breaking encryption on these is not like search warrants of yesteryear, and not like wire taps. In traditional search warrant they would not be seizing communications. And in wire taps they would only get conversations going forward, not years in the past that they can search through, and even with conversations going forward they sometimes wouldn't be allowed to listen to personal conversations. The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the constitution) is all about protecting us against abuses of government officials. It presumes people in government could be bad, and we need protecting from them. By allowing a government official to seize all our private conversations it could allow a bad government official to go fishing and find things things that they can use against their enemies. There are many, many laws. Many of them aren't enforced, but could be. For example in some states adultery is illegal, even a felony in some states. Not just in small states, but in New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. In Massachusetts there hasn't been an adultery conviction since 1983. But if law enforcement was allowed to decrypt an iPhone, and find private bedroom things, it could be used as an attack on a political enemy. It isn't only "bad people" that should be worried about the government. I think pretty much everyone agrees Martin Luther King Jr. was a good person. But the government at the time didn't think so. When he was killed the first people on the scene were the police officers who were doing surveillance of him from across the street. That is the kind of government we need to be protected from.
  - metta2uall 6y ago
    Whether traditional search warrants or breaking end-to-end encryption violates privacy more really depends on specific cases and the details of how the end-to-end encryption gets broken. Search warrants definitely aim to seize communications and intrude into private notes, collections, offline-only meetings, affairs, and all kinds of potentially embarrassing bedroom items that were purchased anonymously. The only real defence against government abuse is strengthening democratic institutions, respect for human rights, strong oversight, transparency etc.. End-to-end encryption is quite a shallow/weak protection since a truly tyrannical government can easily make it illegal at any time. A lot of government abuse is also possible without breaking encryption. So I think the benefit of end-to-end encryption in protecting against abusive governments is often over-stated. But what about the costs? For example technological progress is making the world more dangerous. Should it be easy for a bunch of people to use unbreakable encryption to coordinate the development extremely dangerous genetically engineered bio-weapons from their homes? If one such person is caught should it be really impossible for 5 judges to allow the police to find all those they've been talking to?
nickthemagicman 6y ago
Moxie Marlinspike made a great point in one of his essays on his website about this. There's 10 to a hundred thousand laws on the books already. How do you know you don't have something to hide?
rapnie 6y ago
I've used most of the arguments against 'nothing to hide' mentality mentioned in this thread, and guess what: most of the people still don't care enough to change a single one of their bad privacy habits. Their eyes glaze over, or they think you are just overly dramatic or a conspiracy thinker, or "I'm not that important" or "Small chance it happens to me", "I trust the government" (when it comes to encryption), etc. Some friends and family I educated in length, and still they are not even willing to e.g. switch their Samsung browser to FF, or install an ad-blocker. The concept of privacy and the consequences of not having it are too abstract for them. It is like saying that climate change will lead to disaster unless we all act now. They will only act after something bad happens to them personally.
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
I find it much easier to argue from the moral perspective. It's my right to hide whatever I want, regardless of whether somebody else considers it "something to hide" or not; just as it's your right to buy a 3m tall chocolate statue of yourself, regardless of whether I think it's something you need. The question is not "is it really necessary?" but "who the #£$! gave you the right to decide whether I consider it to be necessary for myself?" Then again, here in (east) Germany, somebody argues "I have nothnig to hide", you just tell them "Neither did people 40 years ago" and the conversation is pretty much over.
davidd8 6y ago
My take: The “nothing to hide” argument is a fallacy for two reasons: (1) The connotation that things discussed in private are bad. True, criminals may discuss illegal activity in private, but that does not mean everyone’s private conversations are illegal. (2) The notion of what needs “hiding” is subject to opinion, and changes over time. You may not be breaking any laws today, but if the law changes and governments have access to your past data, you are now vulnerable and have nowhere to hide. From my post about privacy not too long ago, https://www.davidexmachina.com/2020/02/privacy-matters.html https://www.davidexmachina.com/2020/02/privacy-matters.html
teddyh 6y ago
That argument is good, and is an example of the type which Bruce Schneier makes in The Eternal Value of Privacy: https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/
_pmf_ 6y ago
Woke cancel culture is a bigger threat to honest people than most governments.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  That might be technically true if you consider woke cancel culture as a single entity and compare it individually to each of the 200-ish less-than-median-size countries (and is definitely (technically) true if you count each state/province/city/county/etc government), but we don't actually care about the average government, we care about the governments that are the biggest threat to honest people, like America, Russia, and China.
  - _pmf_ 6y ago
    Speaking for the Third Reich, the Gestapo heavily relied on Blockwarte, the equivalent of the modern SJW,people who have been manipulated into believing snitching on other people is morally good. A fascist state cannot work against unwilling people.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      Well, it can work fine (if less easily) on people who are unwilling, but not sufficiently principled to martyr themselves, using techniques like described at (https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli...). But, yes, social justice goes hand in hand with facism as the two main pillars of naziism.
- suizi 6y ago
  This is only the case when your government isn't targeting you.
create5 6y ago
why not just straight forward, "I do have something to hide, I do want to hide them from everyone, so what".
wirespot 6y ago
My go-to analogy for understanding privacy in the "nothing to hide" context is simple: "Do you have window curtains?"
addHocker 6y ago
The problem is with the monopol on violence the government is supossed to have. Today, anyone rich enough can have violence or the threat of violence, at a industrial scale like government used to have them. Bezos or Musk could have a rod of god in orbit, and you wouldnt even know. And to prevent this from escalating, as artefacts are getting ever denser, in information, energy and potential - you get a panopticon. Those liberal ideas, where forged in a world, where the peak of energy density and danger was a musket. This world is gone. To prevent it from coming back, we get the panopticon.
lubesGordi 6y ago
You don't feel you have anything to hide, now. But if ever the government started doing something you disagreed with, like started getting too powerful, or using that power unjustly, your ability to check that power would be significantly diminished.
goldenManatee 6y ago
I’ve had those encounters, but I do not understand how many people don’t view privacy as a default to being human.
jancsika 6y ago
The correct response to, "I've got nothing to hide," is a smug, "You definitely have something to hide." Then the person responds, "What are you talking about?" you say: "I can post it on Reddit tomorrow if you're serious about this." Wait a few seconds, then change the subject.
marta_morena_23 6y ago
This analogy is quite weak though. I mean in all honesty: Who in the world would be okay with streaming is drunken bar ramblings on youtube? Of course you have something to hide. There was a Movie "Circle", which kinda was spot on. Privacy is about being able to be yourself. Exploring things. Doing things other people might find creepy. Things that might get you fired, if your co-workers or employer knew about it. By removing privacy, you remove the ability to be yourself. You need to be exactly as society demands it, at all times. The effects of that are catastrophic on humanity. China being a world leader in demonstrating what this does to people and societies, but even China allows for some measure of privacy, as long as you don't do it online and do it at home. Take that away, and society is done. There is only the borg collective left.
mzakharo1 6y ago
Strong encryption is another tool of the rich and powerful to help evade public oversight and scrutiny. Unpopular thought here, cuz, well, most people commenting here are the top wealthy 5-10%, the rich and powerful. It would be a cognitive dissonance to blieve otherwise.
- suizi 6y ago
  Do you think the rich and powerful would be affected by this bill?
- mtrower 6y ago
  I'm neither rich nor powerful. I'm also not comfortable with broken/crippled/backdoored/otherwise false encryption.

by apeace 6y ago

cgrealy 6y ago

If someone says they have nothing to hide, just say “cool, how much do you earn?” Or if you can do it with a straight face “when was the last time you masturbated?” :)

JAlexoid 6y ago
12 minutes ago, why do you ask? :P But income is definitely something that people love to hide. There's a lot of things that all people would love to keep quiet, mostly because their friends or loved ones would find out and may disown them

sixhobbits 6y ago

not sure who to attribute but I like the "privacy is not secrecy. You close the door to the toilet even though we all know what you're doing in there"

cortic 6y ago

My nothing to hide argument is a little different; Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems.. we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.

el_dev_hell 6y ago
I like this argument. My normal response to "I have nothing to hide" is: "Cool, can I take a look at your browser search/reddit history?".
- whatshisface 6y ago
  That argument doesn't work because some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable to anyone they know or work for. (This is impossible when you know or work for diverse groups, but inside of a monoculture it's possible.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - felipemnoa 6y ago
    I don't buy it. We all do things that although not wrong we still wouldn't like to share with anyone. i.e. No person wants to be seen picking their nose, although everybody does it.
    - cgriswald 6y ago
      If someone believes they wouldn't mind being seen picking their nose, it doesn't matter whether they are correct in that assessment. You won't convince them using such an argument because they won't agree with your premise even though you're right.
      - searchableguy 6y ago
        I doubt most of them will agree to me seeing what they do inside bathroom.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable In this time and age, I find that highly doubtful.

kulahan 6y ago

The best argument I ever heard was: "Would you give up your right to free speech just because you have nothing important to say? No? Then why would you give up your right to privacy just because you have nothing to hide?"

jason0597 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken, it was Edward Snowden who said this.
- kulahan 6y ago
  That's correct!
zmmmmm 6y ago
I like that. It raises the important point: of course you don't care about privacy now while you have nothing to hide. You should care about it because one day you might. It might be a stalker, a corrupt government official or policeman, someone at work who is competitive with you, you might be a whistleblower or learn a family secret that would damage your reputation (lets say, your father is a pedophile) .... all these things happen to completely "regular" people who until that point had "nothing to hide" and they end up needing or wishing to hide them in at least some circumstances.
old-gregg 6y ago
While I fully support strong privacy & encryption, there is absolutely no logic in this argument because it tries to build upon an unrelated hypothetical. A stronger argument should have tried to explain how this violates the constitution: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  The logic used here is argument by analogy. Talking about the constitution would be a different argument.

thelittleone 6y ago

Another argument is that a conversation we are having today (nothing to hide and between friends) may be used against us in the future. It could also be used against your children.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I'm stealing your analogy but I'm also ready for people to smugly proclaim that they would have no issue with livestreaming their entire life since they have nothing to hide.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lkxijlewlf 6y ago
Or worse, the one's who smugly say you have no expectation of privacy while in public anyway.
apeace 6y ago
That’s the best part. Remind them that it’s not about you. It’s about whistleblowers and journalists who need to protect their sources, and lawyers who need to communicate with their clients. That tends to bring the ego down a peg ;) But honestly, it’s best not to be aggressive. Some people don’t care much, and you won’t convince them. FWIW, all my non-technical friends use Signal with me, and they know about verifying safety numbers! It can be done.
- lkxijlewlf 6y ago
  > ... It’s about whistleblowers and journalists They'll say the media is the enemy and whistleblowers are traitors who should be shot on site. I'm not even kidding; they'll say this.
  - smegger001 6y ago
    Have you been to my family reunion because I think that may constitute a direct quote. Of course four years ago they espoused the opposite standpoint toward whistle-blowers because obviously the other-side was bad-wrong and this administration is right-good.
- fiblye 6y ago
  People who actually think this is fine tend to hate journalists and especially lawyers. They might walk away thinking this is a great idea.

newfeatureok 6y ago

I'm not really sure this is a good argument at all. In your scenario, if the two people have nothing to hide why would they care? You're better of appealing to things that they normally might want to hide, like an embarrassing act or things that are said that are questionable out of context, etc. A person who truly has nothing to hide, by definition, would not care about privacy. The entire point of privacy is that there are things that we do not want to share, for whatever reason.

apeace 6y ago
People tend to feel attacked when you argue that they do, in fact, have something to hide. Even when you come from the perspective that everyone has something to hide, mostly small things. I've had the best success with the argument I posted. It helps people understand that privacy isn't "hiding", it's normal. What's not normal is guaranteeing your government can see everything you do all the time, and we should think about whether that's what we want.
- lovelyviking 6y ago
  Actually it reveals a twist in those in favour of surveillance . What they do they falsely accuse you of 'hiding' while you simply naturally expected not to be invaded. They invade you and then they they kind of ask you what is the problem? you have something to hide? And some people say : Oh, we have nothing to hide. But the problem is the fact of invasion, not wether they have to hide something or not. It's like someone invades your territory or takes your stuff and you say, oh, i don't really need those. It's not the problem wether you need those or not. The problem is that you can't decide about it anymore, you right to decide was taken away. In case of property you loose right to private property. In case of free speech you loose your right for free speech. In case of privacy you loose your right choose not to be watched. You loose ability to decide to be private if you wish. That is the problem.

grawprog 6y ago

>here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Personally I like to just remind people if we had nothing to hide, nobody would wear clothing, own curtains, or care about peeping toms.

serf 6y ago
>Personally I like to just remind people if we had nothing to hide, nobody would wear clothing, you must live in a nice climate.
- grawprog 6y ago
  Nah, I live in bc, but I mean we do have a nudist beach here that's pretty popular like 2 months a year.

godelski 6y ago

I mentioned something about this yesterday in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693298 Basically it isn't about having anything to hide but the instability of democracy and what power bad actors have. Do I have anything to hide from Google? Not really. But do I want that same data that Google has to be in the hands of someone like Putin? No. I don't even want it in the hands of the NSA. The issue is that if we say that ads can manipulate people to buy things, why can't they manipulate people to do things like vote or divide. Russia's strategy since the Cold War has been to divide and prod The West, to sow disruption. That disruption has caused consolidation of power but also makes it difficult for coalitions to get things done. It is clear that anger generates more clicks, so why is it unrealistic to think bad actors can use that data to better divide us and sow discontent? The next factor is that democracy relies on a distribution of power. Data collection is a means to consolidate power. There's the term "turnkey tyranny" that's thrown around. The reason isn't because we think a tyrant is going to come to power and destroy our way of life, but rather that we recognize that such a thing is possible and want to ensure that such actions would be infeasible if a malicious actor gained power. In democracy power is distributed. This has pros and cons. But the point of distribution is so that consolidation is difficult and we can never have a monarch or tyrant. So it has never been about having something to hide (which btw, do people know they are referencing Goebbels?), but about stability in democracy. Distribution of power that was inherent to the system in the past is no longer built in. Technology has changed and enabled things we never previously imagined.

dcow 6y ago
Sadly I've come to the conclusion that people don't really actually care about the stability of democracy so long as they have food on the table and a warm bed at night. No matter the fact that a stable democracy free from the tyrannical rule of a monarch is what gave rise to their entire lifestyle as they know it. But people forget so quickly what we sacrifice for democracy. It's almost irrelevant, though. Our once pristine western democracy has been slowly eroded by the forces free markets. So I don't know who's crazier, the people who seem to care less about the values required to maintain a democracy, or the people who still think we participate in one...

jrumbut 6y ago

I think the key here isn't broadcasting, it's storage. In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. Your conversations were recorded, the data leaked to or purchased by a fly by night company hired by your bank, and now suddenly despite your excellent credit history you can't get a 30 year mortgage, you try to find a new job but companies are only offering 6 month contracts, etc. It's hard to prove a database doesn't exist, better to encrypt the content beforehand and make it harder to create.

einpoklum 6y ago
> In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. We probably won't.
- beckingz 6y ago
  Want to see if we can get 10M in VC money to try?
- cgriswald 6y ago
  Whether it works is irrelevant. If anyone buys it, the time between belief and disbelief will be longer than the time it takes to screw up individuals' lives.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  We're[1] already doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3OrRsLq-eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3OrRsLq-eg [1] someone, not me; "Cognito is a keylogger that tracks typing metrics, analyzes them with AI to diagnose Parkinson's"
tribeca18 6y ago
Oddly specific, but this is such a great plausible example that I'm going to use from now on.
- jrumbut 6y ago

shay_ker 6y ago

I like the speeding analogy. "I have nothing to hide" "Have you ever sped on the highway?" "Well, yes" "Imagine if the government reveals it's been tracking everyone's speed, and has decided to write everyone tickets for speeding." "That's insane, the government can't do that!" "Exactly"

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
esrauch 6y ago
I don't know, tracking everyone's speed to issue tickets doesn't sound nearly as bad as having a recording of 100% of all remote conversations.
- tintor 6y ago
  Speed with location, as speed limit depends on where you are driving, which is tracking of your movement.
- webmaven 6y ago
  What if they issue retroactive speeding tickets all at once for the last 10 years?
  - esrauch 6y ago
    I mean, up to the legal statute of limitations they can do that right (eg if they had speed camera recordings that they realized were accidentally unreviewed, they could use those and issue tickets without it being much of a morality issue). It is maybe unfair because of a sudden burden and no ability to change your behavior before it added up to a huge sum, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with privacy.
  - jcwayne 6y ago
    With failure to pay eventually landing you in jail.
6y ago

arafa 6y ago

I like to tell people about programs like "LOVEINT" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT). Where there is personal information available to others, it can and will be abused in ways you won't approve of. Privacy might seem like an abstract concern until you or someone you know is being stalked, etc.

andrepd 6y ago

There's other ways. Ask them for their passwords, ask them to hand their phone and riffle through their conversations and photos. If I know they won't be offended them I'll ask them to send me nudes or if they would let me put a camera in their shower. After all, if you're have nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, so why should you close your shower curtain?

kelnos 6y ago
> why should you close your shower curtain? Because otherwise you get water all over your bathroom floor?

manfredo 6y ago

While this is on the right track, one would point out that these conversations wouldn't be public they would only be visible to government authorities. I think the due process argument is more compelling. Part of preventing abuses and corruption by law enforcement is ensuring they can only surveil people with reasonable suspicion. Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. But it's crucial that this gets approval from the courts to prevent agencies from snooping on people not for law enforcement but to gain leverage and power. Your privacy helps us prevent the next J Edgar Hoover even if you have nothing to hide.

lovelyviking 6y ago
>Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. When I read this as you put it . It comes to me something we tend to forget that surveillance is a form of attack on a person's freedom obviously. The fact of it presence is already an insult actually.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

_AzMoo 6y ago

For those who aren't convinced by this argument, you can take it a little further by introducing a hypothetical situation in which their political opponents obtain power and criminalise criticism of government or other powerful "common-good" entities. Now your recorded conversations could become evidence of sedition, and even if it wasn't criminal at the time it could certainly be used to show evidence of previous behaviour.

nopeNopeNooope 6y ago

This is better: "Cool, call your girlfriend while I listen to you two having phone sex. Right now. You have nothing to hide right? Let's hear it. I can turn around if that makes it easier, so you don't have to see my face. Come on then, you've got nothing to hide right? Should I call her and see if she's game since you're chicken?"

jay_kyburz 6y ago

I think this misses the point. When people say "nothing to hide" they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_. I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships. We need privacy because if ever laws are passed that we don't agree with, we need to be able to break them until we can have the law changed. For example, if it was against the law to be a pro-democracy protestor.

pdonis 6y ago
> When people say "nothing to hide" they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_. I don't think so. I think people simply mean they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in all of their personal activities. There are lots of things I say and do that law enforcement would not be interested in at all, but that I still want to keep private, simply because I want to. I shouldn't have to give a reason; privacy should be the default. People who genuinely want to share every little detail of their personal lives already have Facebook.
krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
> I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships. What bizarro alternate reality do you live in where this is the case?
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  I don't know, but its scary here. Police march the streets firing rubber bullets into crowds. A leader who makes repeated and sustained attacks to discredit the media with the deliberate intention of having a population with no trusted or reliable sources of information. Foreign interference in elections. Oh yeah, and laws that ban encryption.
jejeyyy77 6y ago
The funny thing is, the reason I support surveillance and legislation against encrypted messaging (or at least a backdoor for law enforcement) is extremist groups like ANTIFA

lr4444lr 6y ago

Most people implicitly mean, "nothing unlawful to hide" when they say that, I think.

suizi 6y ago
What if the government decides protesting is unlawful?

EGreg 6y ago

The police should wear body cams all the time, and we can end qualified immunity Got nothing to hide and there will be no problem, right?

Nition 6y ago

I saved a link to this post a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli... I won't try and summarise it because I think I'd do a disservice to it, but it's another really good argument, ostensibly from experience, re corrupt countries and surveillance.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

In the US, this argument is even easier to debunk, especially when it comes from middle-class adults who've been working for a while. "I have nothing to hide" "What's your salary and your spouse's salary?" The huge amount of secrecy around salaries in the US is proof that a lot of people have perfectly innocuous secrets that they very much like to hide.

jejeyyy77 6y ago
The IRS already knows that information... The question is not whether you have anything to hide, it’s about whether you have anything to hide from law enforcement. HUGE diffeeence.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Unless this bill's critics are mistaken, if your friends are using "file encryption", i.e, encrypting the contents of the communications themselves before sending, then this bill has no effect on that. IMO, your friends, unless they are nerds, are never going to place much value on encryption when they never actually use it themselves. When some third party tech company is doing the "end-to-end encryption" for them then your friends are really not in control of the situation, let alone having any reason to understand it. It could be a sham and they might not know it. This bill stands to hurt tech companies but according to its critics (surprise: it's the tech companies) it does not interfere with any individual's use of encryption for communications. No one wants third parties to have potential access their communications. However there is no law preventing a tech company that provides "encrypted messaging" from decrypting people's communications. There is not even a contract with users. If they do this, their liability is zero. There are only "promises", something like, "We promise we won't do it, unless we receive a valid subpoena" or "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages." (Nevermind metadata.) Well, what if some other third party, like the people pushing this bill, made the same promises? Would that be "good enough"? Of course not. For the record, I am not taking a for/against position here. I am not a tech company nor someone trying to get access to encrypted messaging services provided by tech companies. However if something came along -- not suggesting this is it -- that created the necessary evolutionary pressure to make every person, not just "bad guys", have a basic understanding of how to encrypt a file and send it over an insecure network, without relying on a third party for the encryption, then I would think that would be a good thing.

a1369209993 6y ago
> "We have made it technically impossible to see your messages." That one's not actually a "promise"; it's either true and sufficient (although it's hard to imagine how if the software supports automatic updates), or a direct lie because they have not in fact made it impossible.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Seems like it is impossible to verify whether it is true because we cannot see exactly what they are doing. We are just taking their word for it. It can be nothing more than a "promise" because we are not the ones responsible for carrying out the encryption. We have to trust both (a) the encryption software, which we can examine, and (b) the third person doing the encryption, who is unfortunately operating outside our view. Even if the third person is trustworthy, if they make a mistake, they are not liable for anything. They are not even obligated to tell us they made a mistake. Usually when we trust people to do something important for us, we have some recourse against them if things go south. It is more than just a promise. They have skin in the game.

standardUser 6y ago

The "nothing to hide" argument is so old and easily debunk-able, I don't take seriously anyone who offers it up at this point.

lovelyviking 6y ago
>easily debunk-able, I don't take seriously anyone who offers it up at this point. I also do not take such person seriously but if I wish to convince such person I need a good argument that works. If it's easy debunk-able for you I would be interested to see a few from you.

treis 6y ago

This is a terrible analogy. What's actually happening is that Facebook, Google, et.al. can read your messages and the Government can do so with a warrant. Nobody is planning on broadcasting everything to everyone. We don't have to ask people if they would do that or not. The vast majority of them do that today.

mindfulhack 6y ago

Humans need privacy because of the selfishness of our survival biology. There simply are bad people in the world, and I wish it were different, but it's not. 'Just trust us' are words often told to us by people who only want power - at our expense. The best sentiment I've ever heard about privacy is from Shoshana Zuboff, and it's now influenced my thoughts. It's at the end of her amazing 2018 book 'Surveillance Capitalism', the best book on tech I have ever read. She shares a conclusion along this line: To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity. She explains that there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. We need freedom of diversity - to will - to decide for ourselves. Otherwise, and now I conclude, bad actors with power lust will only bend the world to their vision. The guilt-tripping words of "nothing to hide" come from a place of privilege - or worse, hypocrisy. It is an insult to anyone who is different from the norm, and who wants to be themselves. What you have every right to hide does not even have to be illegal, but often it is, like LGBTQ people last century. Illegal ≠ immoral. Privacy is a core freedom to protect human diversity. It must not be shamed. It must be loved. Cherished. Treasured. Privacy begets diversity. Surveillance begets conformity. Which one is more important for the development of life in the universe? As a child, I instinctively knew that privacy was something natural and important in life. Now as an adult, with education and intellect I can articulate why - and resist psychological manipulation and intellectual dishonesty from others trying to tell us that privacy should die. I'm able to see the insanity of my own age. And I will guard privacy with my life on the street, if I have to.

lovelyviking 6y ago
> To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity. >there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. I would agree. Those are very important points. When people being watched they are not as free as they could be in their actions and exploration of ideas, because they measure what to say and what is forbidden to say. This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity domain.
- mindfulhack 6y ago
  > This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity domain. If this is true, then Apple's privacy brand has some long-term legs and some pretty powerful ads in their future - showing creators not being tracked while they freely, privately explore their art on an Apple device.

Rapzid 6y ago

Having a conversation in a bar thinking it's private.. Anyway, it might at well be Pleasantville 1950s for a lot of people. They are both hiding everything and being suspicious AF of anybody with something to hide.

lovelyviking 6y ago

May be a good argument would be that it's not about 'nothing to hide' it's about your authority to decide wether you wish something to hide or not.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. If we are doing imaginary situations, the proponents of this bill can also do something like this: Imagine there is a bar, where the police are unable to go inside. Every day, people go into the bar to plan terror attacks or to spread hate and racism. They can have whoever from across the world join them in the private bar without the police being able to find out. Sometimes they also bring young children into the bar to sexually exploit them. Other times, they bring vulnerable young men and indoctrinate them with their racist hate. The owner of the bar knows that those kinds of things are happening, but they say, a lot of people just come into the bar to talk with friends, so we never allow the police to come. In addition, before serving drinks, the owner puts on a blindfold and stuffs their ears with cotton so they won't be able to see or hear what is going on. They live by the principle: See no evil, hear no evil. The owner of the bar is making a lot of money from the people using the bar. Don't you think we should keep the terrorists, and neo-Nazis, and child molesters from having a bar that they can go to to do and plan their evil stuff that police cannot get to? Don't you think that the bar owners, instead of stuffing their ears and covering their eyes so they are unable to see the bad stuff, should make sure that bad people aren't using their bar for evil stuff. Sure, just like in the real world, you will have your privacy just like you have in your home or at the local bar. But, you would want a real life bar owner to not close their eyes to people using their bar as a planning ground for terrorism, or who are bringing young kids with fake id's to the bar to exploit them, or who are filling young men's minds with hateful, racist lies? Also, just like the police can get a search warrant for a bad person's home or a bar where a lot of bad people are congregating and planning and doing bad things, we think they should also be allowed to do that in the online world. Now tell me, to the average non-tech voter, which will pull the most emotional strings?

lazyasciiart 6y ago
So now, the terrorists and child molesters still use the bar, but they always go into the bathroom to talk. The owner suspects that they are talking about bad things in there, and installs surveillance cameras so that if the police ever need to know what's happening in there, they have access. Would you want a real life bar owner to record you on the toilet just so that one day the police can track some bad guys easily? Probably not. Do you think it's reasonable to expect privacy on the toilet even when you're in a bar owned by someone else? Yes, even if it might one day make law enforcement a little harder. And just like we think that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using places intended for that in the real world, we think they should also have it online.

sameerds 6y ago

You could move that a notch up and say that only the owner of the bar and their friends get to watch all these conversations and they keep copies. That should really freak out some people.

metta2uall 6y ago

But YouTube Live is publicly accessible, it's not the same as a law enforcement warrant. I think a better analogy is whether it should be okay for a judge to allow police officers to storm into your private residence with only a few seconds warning, and then proceed to examine and even take away anything in your room.

antoncohen 6y ago
No, because when police have a search warrant and storm your home, they can't seize the private conversation you had in bed with your partner a year earlier. They can't suck the memories out of your head. Technology like mobile phones and messaging have become an extension of us, they are used for private conversations and personal memories. Breaking encryption on these is not like search warrants of yesteryear, and not like wire taps. In traditional search warrant they would not be seizing communications. And in wire taps they would only get conversations going forward, not years in the past that they can search through, and even with conversations going forward they sometimes wouldn't be allowed to listen to personal conversations. The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the constitution) is all about protecting us against abuses of government officials. It presumes people in government could be bad, and we need protecting from them. By allowing a government official to seize all our private conversations it could allow a bad government official to go fishing and find things things that they can use against their enemies. There are many, many laws. Many of them aren't enforced, but could be. For example in some states adultery is illegal, even a felony in some states. Not just in small states, but in New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. In Massachusetts there hasn't been an adultery conviction since 1983. But if law enforcement was allowed to decrypt an iPhone, and find private bedroom things, it could be used as an attack on a political enemy. It isn't only "bad people" that should be worried about the government. I think pretty much everyone agrees Martin Luther King Jr. was a good person. But the government at the time didn't think so. When he was killed the first people on the scene were the police officers who were doing surveillance of him from across the street. That is the kind of government we need to be protected from.
- metta2uall 6y ago
  Whether traditional search warrants or breaking end-to-end encryption violates privacy more really depends on specific cases and the details of how the end-to-end encryption gets broken. Search warrants definitely aim to seize communications and intrude into private notes, collections, offline-only meetings, affairs, and all kinds of potentially embarrassing bedroom items that were purchased anonymously. The only real defence against government abuse is strengthening democratic institutions, respect for human rights, strong oversight, transparency etc.. End-to-end encryption is quite a shallow/weak protection since a truly tyrannical government can easily make it illegal at any time. A lot of government abuse is also possible without breaking encryption. So I think the benefit of end-to-end encryption in protecting against abusive governments is often over-stated. But what about the costs? For example technological progress is making the world more dangerous. Should it be easy for a bunch of people to use unbreakable encryption to coordinate the development extremely dangerous genetically engineered bio-weapons from their homes? If one such person is caught should it be really impossible for 5 judges to allow the police to find all those they've been talking to?

nickthemagicman 6y ago

Moxie Marlinspike made a great point in one of his essays on his website about this. There's 10 to a hundred thousand laws on the books already. How do you know you don't have something to hide?

rapnie 6y ago

I've used most of the arguments against 'nothing to hide' mentality mentioned in this thread, and guess what: most of the people still don't care enough to change a single one of their bad privacy habits. Their eyes glaze over, or they think you are just overly dramatic or a conspiracy thinker, or "I'm not that important" or "Small chance it happens to me", "I trust the government" (when it comes to encryption), etc. Some friends and family I educated in length, and still they are not even willing to e.g. switch their Samsung browser to FF, or install an ad-blocker. The concept of privacy and the consequences of not having it are too abstract for them. It is like saying that climate change will lead to disaster unless we all act now. They will only act after something bad happens to them personally.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

I find it much easier to argue from the moral perspective. It's my right to hide whatever I want, regardless of whether somebody else considers it "something to hide" or not; just as it's your right to buy a 3m tall chocolate statue of yourself, regardless of whether I think it's something you need. The question is not "is it really necessary?" but "who the #£$! gave you the right to decide whether I consider it to be necessary for myself?" Then again, here in (east) Germany, somebody argues "I have nothnig to hide", you just tell them "Neither did people 40 years ago" and the conversation is pretty much over.

davidd8 6y ago

My take: The “nothing to hide” argument is a fallacy for two reasons: (1) The connotation that things discussed in private are bad. True, criminals may discuss illegal activity in private, but that does not mean everyone’s private conversations are illegal. (2) The notion of what needs “hiding” is subject to opinion, and changes over time. You may not be breaking any laws today, but if the law changes and governments have access to your past data, you are now vulnerable and have nowhere to hide. From my post about privacy not too long ago, https://www.davidexmachina.com/2020/02/privacy-matters.html https://www.davidexmachina.com/2020/02/privacy-matters.html

teddyh 6y ago

That argument is good, and is an example of the type which Bruce Schneier makes in The Eternal Value of Privacy: https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/

_pmf_ 6y ago

Woke cancel culture is a bigger threat to honest people than most governments.

a1369209993 6y ago
That might be technically true if you consider woke cancel culture as a single entity and compare it individually to each of the 200-ish less-than-median-size countries (and is definitely (technically) true if you count each state/province/city/county/etc government), but we don't actually care about the average government, we care about the governments that are the biggest threat to honest people, like America, Russia, and China.
- _pmf_ 6y ago
  Speaking for the Third Reich, the Gestapo heavily relied on Blockwarte, the equivalent of the modern SJW,people who have been manipulated into believing snitching on other people is morally good. A fascist state cannot work against unwilling people.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    Well, it can work fine (if less easily) on people who are unwilling, but not sufficiently principled to martyr themselves, using techniques like described at (https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli...). But, yes, social justice goes hand in hand with facism as the two main pillars of naziism.
suizi 6y ago
This is only the case when your government isn't targeting you.

create5 6y ago

why not just straight forward, "I do have something to hide, I do want to hide them from everyone, so what".

wirespot 6y ago

My go-to analogy for understanding privacy in the "nothing to hide" context is simple: "Do you have window curtains?"

addHocker 6y ago

The problem is with the monopol on violence the government is supossed to have. Today, anyone rich enough can have violence or the threat of violence, at a industrial scale like government used to have them. Bezos or Musk could have a rod of god in orbit, and you wouldnt even know. And to prevent this from escalating, as artefacts are getting ever denser, in information, energy and potential - you get a panopticon. Those liberal ideas, where forged in a world, where the peak of energy density and danger was a musket. This world is gone. To prevent it from coming back, we get the panopticon.

lubesGordi 6y ago

You don't feel you have anything to hide, now. But if ever the government started doing something you disagreed with, like started getting too powerful, or using that power unjustly, your ability to check that power would be significantly diminished.

goldenManatee 6y ago

I’ve had those encounters, but I do not understand how many people don’t view privacy as a default to being human.

jancsika 6y ago

The correct response to, "I've got nothing to hide," is a smug, "You definitely have something to hide." Then the person responds, "What are you talking about?" you say: "I can post it on Reddit tomorrow if you're serious about this." Wait a few seconds, then change the subject.

marta_morena_23 6y ago

This analogy is quite weak though. I mean in all honesty: Who in the world would be okay with streaming is drunken bar ramblings on youtube? Of course you have something to hide. There was a Movie "Circle", which kinda was spot on. Privacy is about being able to be yourself. Exploring things. Doing things other people might find creepy. Things that might get you fired, if your co-workers or employer knew about it. By removing privacy, you remove the ability to be yourself. You need to be exactly as society demands it, at all times. The effects of that are catastrophic on humanity. China being a world leader in demonstrating what this does to people and societies, but even China allows for some measure of privacy, as long as you don't do it online and do it at home. Take that away, and society is done. There is only the borg collective left.

mzakharo1 6y ago

Strong encryption is another tool of the rich and powerful to help evade public oversight and scrutiny. Unpopular thought here, cuz, well, most people commenting here are the top wealthy 5-10%, the rich and powerful. It would be a cognitive dissonance to blieve otherwise.

suizi 6y ago
Do you think the rich and powerful would be affected by this bill?
mtrower 6y ago
I'm neither rich nor powerful. I'm also not comfortable with broken/crippled/backdoored/otherwise false encryption.