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'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2007)
- josephcsible 5y agoThis paper is available without a paywall at https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/ https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/ and https://digital.sandiego.edu/sdlr/vol44/iss4/5/ https://digital.sandiego.edu/sdlr/vol44/iss4/5/
- czzr 5y agoBut SSRN doesn’t have a paywall?
- josephcsible 5y agoWhoops, you're right. I guess I had a case of banner blindness or something.
- eloeffler 5y agoIt's good to see the argument being extended to the social aspect of it (p. 762). The "I've got nothing to hide" stance is often countered with stories how an individual may run into unexpected trouble for themselves. But data aggregation has made sharing information a collective issue. And sharing information becomes a social requirement as we go along. This has consequences even for those who choose not to share private information easily (or who try to keep it limited).
- junon 5y agoSimple response to "I've got nothing to hide" is "alrighty, take off your clothes in front of everyone in this restaurant if you have nothing to hide." It's worked a few times for me now (illustrating the point, not getting them naked). Another one is "then why do you shut the curtains at night?" or "why do you lock your front door?" or "do you lock the bathroom door when you're at home with loved ones?" But I feel those don't make as much of an impact and invite snarky responses more than the first one.
- MikeUt 5y agoI don't like those responses, because they fundamentally don't address the issue. What if the person is okay with a trustworthy government agent/system seeing them naked, or having a copy of their house key? This way they won't be embarrassed in public, or get robbed, while the government still gets what it needs to "keep them safe". I think a better response is - what if they did have something to hide? What if they were a government or corporate whistleblower, a human rights lawyer, or a journalist? What if the government changes and suddenly their friendship with a Tibetan sympathizer becomes a liability? What if they're none of those, but due to their carelessness, make whistleblowers stand out because they're the only ones trying to keep some privacy, making them easy to find an retaliate against?
- alpaca128 5y ago> what if they did have something to hide? Or, what if something harmless becomes illegal overnight and now it's too late to hide existing links to you? The "nothing to hide" argument relies on the assumption that governments and laws remain stable. Which is obviously far from reality. We have an example of a country getting split in half literally within one night, and right now people are still getting executed for having the wrong religion or sexuality - or, like recently in Afghanistan, because they dared to work as translator for US troops.
- matz1 5y ago>Or, what if something harmless becomes illegal So this is the actual issue then ? Instead of resorting to hiding, should instead fix the root issue: change the law.
- MikeUt 5y agoDoes surveillance make it easier, or harder, to change unjust law, or an unjust government? Or even learn there are injustices being carried out in the first place? Suppose the people of Hong Kong followed your advice, and had allowed surveillance infrastructure to spread through their city, mapping out everyone's social graphs and political affiliations. Now that a hostile government is in charge of their city, there is no reason to worry the govt. has inherited all the gathered information and knows exactly who to target - if they don't like it, they should fix the root issue and change the law.
- kfprt 5y agoFor the remaining few who have nothing to hide I am willing to make myself available to rifle through your possessions to verify that you do in fact have nothing to hide.
- Deestan 5y agoIncluding any secrets or confidential chats others have trusted them with.
- kfprt 5y agoI can promise to keep their information anonymous, just like the government never unreasonably 'unmasks' anyone.
- kylebyproxy 5y agoBut then you'd have unilateral coercive power over me. It needs to be a two-way street for either of us to be sure the other isn't a bad actor. I'll happily broadcast my entire (boring) existence so long as everyone else does the same. End the privacy arms race. It's exhausting and frankly immature.
- joshuaissac 5y agoIt is the same when the authorities do it. They want to violate your privacy but they do not want you to violate theirs.
- dionidium 5y agoThe phrase doesn't mean, "I have nothing to hide from anyone at any time for any reason." It means, "I have nothing to hide from authorities who are looking at my data in an official capacity, so I'm willing to cede my privacy to those particular actors in that specific context." It might still be a bad argument, but your retort doesn't address it.
- npteljes 5y ago
- Penyngton 5y agoMaybe it would be topical to use a "herd immunity" argument. We all need to have privacy to protect those who are vulnerable as it's impossible to only protect the "at risk" people.
- qwertox 5y agoGood point. This would be worth an article.
- FeteCommuniste 5y agoThat's a nice analogy! And just as with diseases, it sometimes happens that people are a lot more vulnerable than they thought.
- TuringNYC 5y agoEach time someone presented the "nothing to hide" argument, I've responded -- "great, may I have your phone, I'd love to browse through some of your emails and photos"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- twirligigue 5y agoExactly. I don't have anything to hide, but there are some things I need to protect.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y agoI got upset about Echelon, almost 30 years ago, and then got further upset with the Patriot Act. The internet kill switch. Etc. Et. al. In speaking with my pastor about these things, he gave me the line, "I've got nothing to hide." Sure, he, personally, is above reproach, and would lay his life bare, but he considers conversations with people he counsels to be sacrosanct. Would he like his text messages and emails published? Of course not. Even he absolutely DOES have things to hide! My pastor is a superhumanly wise person. Almost everything he has said has turned out to be true. Of the Patriot Act, he agreed that the government probably overreached, but he said these things are like a pendulum, and eventually it would swing back. On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going. The problem is that both sides of US politics are in on it, so I don't know what will ever correct this course. It seems that, eventually, we'll have Chinese-style, socially-scored citizenship, just run by corporations instead of the government.
- atatatat 5y agoIt's done by corpos, and gov, in both places.
- redis_mlc 5y ago> but he said these things are like a pendulum, and eventually it would swing back. No, data collection only expands. Our TLAs vacuum up everything they can. The fusion centers do data mining and send automated faxes to local police stations. Luckily they complain it's too much to read, so the faxes go in the round file. There's a misunderstanding on HN that TLAs can't spy on US domestic citizens, but that hasn't been true for over 20 years. (Before that, Echelon and email users suspected of having one or more foreign parties were the fig leaves used to spy on people, but those rules are no longer followed.) (Yahoo has a linux kernel module installed on email servers to allow real-time keyword matching of traffic, approved by Mayer.) > eventually, we'll have Chinese-style, socially-scored citizenship, just run by corporations instead of the government. The government has X-Key-Score. They also buy social media feeds and credit stream data. Family courts (!), of all things, essentially monitor everything you do and every step you take after they get involved in your life without any effective oversight - it's like parole.
- 5y ago
- jmclnx 5y agoFunny thing, even 2000 years ago or so this concept of "Nothing to Hide" was known. There is a passage in the bible about "throwing the first stone". Seems people in power throughout history have been wanting to pry into people's private lives. And 'regular' people feed that need themselves by watching "Reality TV" and following paparazzi type media outlets.
- rantwasp 5y agoyou’re not allowed to use the bible that way. you can only use it to justify irrational beliefs and hate towards others that don’t align with your view of the world. /s seriously though, if people actually applied what the bible said in the context that it is said I think we would all literally be in a better place.
- avnigo 5y agoA well-spoken related talk [0] by Glenn Greenwald on 'Why privacy matter' that serves as a good argument against 'nothing to hide'. [0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- legrande 5y agoMy current mantra regarding privacy both offline and online: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" - Cardinal Richelieu Imagine terabytes of data?!
- shantnutiwari 5y agoI liked Snowden argument: “Arguing 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://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7308507-arguing-that-you-don-t-care-about-the-right-to-privacy https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7308507-arguing-that-you-do...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago> saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” Replace “nothing to say” with “nothing offensive to say” and you actually would have a lot of people agreeing with you.
- vorpalhex 5y agoStanding up for gay marriage used to be "offensive".
- briefcomment 5y agoDissidents in China are just offensive then?
- aksss 5y agoVery true. There are people in the US actively fighting for a right to not be offended at the cost of society's freedom of speech. What a devil's bargain!
- alexfromapex 5y agoThe "Nothing to Hide" people need to have government operatives come stay with them in their home and then they'll understand.
- sumtechguy 5y agoI 'have nothing to hide'. But I also am of the mind it is none of your business.
- npteljes 5y agoThis is a good one. It's snappy and makes the point clearly - that the private information is by default need to know, not public.
- triska 5y agoThe most striking argument against "I've got nothing to hide" is that it's wrong, because many of us in fact must hide something: Take for instance the terms and conditions that you have to agree to when you sign up for a Visa card or Mastercard: https://www.cardcomplete.com/media/medialibrary/2021/03/AGBs_Kreditkarten_ENG_0719.pdf https://www.cardcomplete.com/media/medialibrary/2021/03/AGBs... Quoting from the text (section 5.5): "The Cardholder must not disclose the assigned PIN, nor any personally chosen PIN (see Item 17.8.), nor the Secure Code to anyone, not even to employees of card complete. The Cardholder is responsible for ensuring strict secrecy concerning all card security details – PIN, Secure Code and mobileTANs received on his/her telephone (to be used for authenticating a ViS/MCID transaction and valid for a maximum of 5 minutes after receipt) – and must take all reasonable precautions to ensure that they cannot be discovered by others." Thus, if you sign these conditions, you are obligated to keep this information secret. Similar obligations are imposed on customers for other cards and in other circumstances, in communication with banks, insurance companies etc. To keep these secrets, we need secure ways to store this information, and secure ways to communicate.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoMy more vulgar take is that everyone needs to go to the toilet eventually and most people prefer to do it in private.
- teddyh 5y agoI vastly prefer Bruce Schneier’s take (from 2006): 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/
- adventured 5y agoThe "I've got nothing to hide" mental approach isn't a misunderstanding. The author is wrong about that. It's almost exclusively about an intense fear of confrontation. The alternative mental approach is a forced point of confrontation with imposing authorities, which terrifies the average person (depending on the country and its authorities, that may be a particularly rational reaction). Most people spend their entire lives avoiding confrontation whenever they can. They dread confrontations with a boss, co-workers, a spouse, friends, a waiter, a bully, a landlord, with nearly anybody. It causes immense anxiety for most people and they will seek to avoid it at great cost. Now elevate it to the level of challenging the divine god-king powers of an omnipotent US federal government (a slight exaggeration) that throws around trillions of dollars like it's nothing, has a history of putting hundreds of thousands of people into prison unjustly in domestic 'wars' (war on drugs, war on crime, war on booze) and murders women and children by the thousands in pointless foreign wars with zero moral qualms (not an exaggeration). Now go challenge that beast head-on and proclaim loudly: you have no right to invade my privacy! Me, the little mouse down here (how the average person actually views their own existence), hear me roar! The average person is afraid of confrontation with their landlord, and they're going to do that mentally? They're going to challenge goliath? No, they're not. They're going to instantly shrink away as fast as they can. When they know there is something questionable about what the authorities are doing, and they fear that confrontation, the fastest way to mentally run away is: I have nothing to hide. And that's all before we get to the entirely practical time limiting factors. The average person is also tired, maxed out on obligations (work, social, other), mentally stressed. That adds to their reasoning for avoiding conflicts, as conflicts can be expensive and risky. They don't like conflict to begin with, if you add in the pile of risk factors, it just makes it that much more desirable to avoid/evade if at all possible. The only thing that's very interesting about the "I've got nothing to hide" approach, is how many people fail to grasp what the actual root of the issue is. It's fear of confrontation, not a misunderstanding, not vast ignorance. It can't be solved for, you're never going to convince the majority to be confrontational (they never have been), it will always be down to a small'ish minority of people to fight on their behalf (this is true whether we're talking about the Revolutionary War, WW2, civil wars, privacy, human rights in general, you name it). The majority will always seek safety in numbers (think about it). I've got nothing to hide, is: I shall camouflage into the herd, nothing about me is particularly special, I don't stand out, I can avoid risky confrontation in this way (the highest % safety calculation for the majority is to hide in the herd; these calculations are made largely automatically, subconsciously, it's a biological function we do as animals), what are the odds they isolate on me (also the calculations for a typical person in Soviet Russia or any totalitarian system on a day to day basis, that's how such people get by and survive). It's an evolutionary survival tactic, it's not newly spawned due to the privacy debate, that's merely one application of it.
- marlowe221 5y agoWhen people tell me they have nothing to hide, my response is usually, "Do you close the door when you use the bathroom?" Alright, then.
- npteljes 5y agoLet me challenge this. What would you reply to: "Of course I close the bathroom, silly, I don't want you to be peeking in. But what would the Chinese government do with the information that I've been just dropping a fat one?"
- P41M0N0 5y agoI have trouble preaching privacy when the "what about terrorists?" card gets pulled. I can tell them how the NSA's bulk collection of phone calls stopped 0 terrorist attacks, but as long as they can name 1 incident where breach of public privacy prevented an attack, it's worth it. I really don't think it is, but I'm not sure how to convey a reason which will resonate with them.
- aksss 5y agoThis isn't just the privacy convo - it's 2A, it's helmet laws, it's CPS being called on "unattended kids", it's legalization. Freedom means absorbing and managing risk in ways that acknowledge some level of harm is acceptable. That's the very difficult conversation you're running into. How to tell that person that the one attack prevented was not worth the privacy invaded for the million other instances. Crack that nut and you've figured something important out, rhetorically. Because socially, and in our education system, we're not doing a very good job coaching people about or taking pride in the idea of "acceptable risk".
- codethief 5y agoAnother counter against "I've got nothing to hide" is: You don't decide what's worth hiding. The police / intelligence agencies / whoever has access to your data do and they are really good at misinterpreting and mischaracterizing you. Besides, what's legal today, might be illegal tomorrow.
- npteljes 5y agoExamples of surveillance abuse could work for some, but I think the problem is that people don't feel it themselves that the privacy violation happens. No negative feedback at all, the cute device just slurps the data, and the badness, if ever, comes only much later. Just like people who gamble away their life savings in the curtained rooms of a casino.
- dwg465 5y agoAnyone have a good summarization of the piece? I am not looking to get 28 pages deep into the argument
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Etherlord87 5y ago[if there's two posts - I couldn't edit the first one to fix formatting, nor could I delete it] TLDR: the author first steelmans the "nothing to hide" argument, we can present it as: "People who take part in illegal activities have no right for privacy of those activities. Intimate aspects of one's life are filtered by mindless automated algorithms, and are unlikely to be of interest to NSA; even if they happen to be, they will be processed by few government officials and unlikely to leak outside; regardless, it is a (statistically) small privacy sacrifice for a potential national security gain". Then the author proceeds to explain what is privacy. It looks like he has spend a lot of time conceptualizing privacy and the subject of the paper is just an excuse to present his taxonomy of privacy. This motivation strongly hampers the argumentation in the book, which simply points out that as privacy is not just about "hiding the wrong", which is an incorrect premise of the "nothing to hide" argument. The author doesn't really tackle the "sacrifice" argument he himself brought up, other than arguing why privacy is more important than it might seem (and therefore the sacrifice is greater): "Even surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them." - no source for the claim, there is a source however to the statement that it would be hard to prove: "The nothing to hide argument focuses primarily on the information collection problems associated with the NSA programs. It contends that limited surveillance of lawful activity will not chill behavior sufficiently to outweigh the security benefits. One can certainly quarrel with this argument, but one of the difficulties with chilling effects is that it is often very hard to demonstrate concrete evidence of deterred behavior." [Daniel J. Solove, The First Amendment as Criminal Procedure, 82 N.Y.U. L. R EV . 112, 154–59 (2007).] Another counterargument is that even if you think whatever information there about you can be known by government without harm to you, through aggregation and cross-analisys, new information about you can be evaluated, which you wouldn't want to be known to the government. Also, amassing knowledge about citizens gives government power and therefore creates disbalance between the power of government and its citizens. So the only way the "sacrifice" argument is countered in the book is to put some light on how the sacrifice is actually quite bigger than it might seem - which doesn't require philosophical approach to privacy, just listing various negative effects of (mass) surveilance. -- Fragments I found interesting: The argument is not only of recent vintage. For example, one of the characters in Henry James’s 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: “[I]f these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing.” -- Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared, “Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.” 29 Likewise, in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. “‘An altogether minor matter,’ the prosecutor replied . . . . ‘A crime can always be found.’” -- As one comment to my blog post noted: “If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?” Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues: There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes’ questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters. -- As one commenter aptly notes: By saying “I have nothing to hide,” you are saying that it’s OK for the government to infringe on the rights of potentially millions of your fellow Americans, possibly ruining their lives in the process. To me, the “I have nothing to hide” argument basically equates to “I don’t care what happens, so long as it doesn’t happen to me.” -- [Stronger forms of the argument are presented, like:] Privacy involves a person’s “right to conceal discreditable facts about himself.”[...]Posner asserts that the law should not protect people in concealing discreditable information. “The economist,” he argues, “sees a parallel to the efforts of sellers to conceal defects in their products.” -- In a less extreme form, the nothing to hide argument does not refer to all personal information, but only to that subset of personal information that is likely to be involved in government surveillance.[...] Information about what phone numbers people dial and even what they say in many conversations is often not likely to be embarrassing or discreditable to a law-abiding citizen. Retorts to the nothing to hide argument about exposing people’s naked bodies to the world or revealing their deepest secrets to their friends are only relevant if there is a likelihood that such programs will actually result in these kinds of disclosures. This type of information is not likely to be captured in the government surveillance. Even if it were, many people might rationally assume that the information will be exposed only to a few law enforcement officials, and perhaps not even seen by human eyes. Computers might store the data and analyze it for patterns, but no person might have any contact with the data. -- The taxonomy I developed is as follows: Information Collection Surveillance Interrogation Information Processing Aggregation Identification Insecurity Secondary Use Exclusion Information Dissemination Breach of Confidentiality Disclosure Exposure Increased Accessibility Blackmail Appropriation Distortion Invasion Intrusion Decisional Interference -- Under current Supreme Court Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, when the government gathers data from third parties, there is no Fourth Amendment protection because people lack a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in information exposed to others. 76 In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court concluded that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in bank records because “[a]ll of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.” 77 In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that people lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they “know that they must convey numerical information to the phone company,” and therefore they cannot “harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret.” -- Most privacy problems lack dead bodies. Of course, there are exceptional cases such as the murders of Rebecca Shaeffer and Amy Boyer. Rebecca Shaeffer was an actress killed when a stalker obtained her address from a Department of Motor Vehicles record.