5 ms·

Nobody put it better than Snowden: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don

by dTal 5y ago

Nobody put it better than Snowden: "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."

baal80spam 5y ago
Personally I prefer: "Oh, you say you have nothing to hide? In this case, how about you lend me your smartphone/laptop for a day, unlocked." This seems simple enough for most people to understand the crazyness of the idea.
- raspyberr 5y ago
  I really dislike this comparison. I see it everywhere in privacy communities and I think it should die. That comparison doesn't give anything to the other person. Amazon provides a service whilst violating privacy. The person gets something out from having their privacy violated. Hence the reply "it improves my search results". Your comparison would mean they have their privacy violated, they lose access to their phone for a day, and they get nothing to compensate. Change the comparison to give me your phone for a day and I'll give you £1000 and suddenly you'll get far more different answers.
  - baal80spam 5y ago
    > That comparison doesn't give anything to the other person Hm, you are correct - I haven't looked at it in this way. I guess it's time for another round of questions around my family and workplace!
  - Keyframe 5y ago
    Give me access to your phone and your email for a couple of days - it will improve our conversations, so many topics suddenly! Effectively this is what search and advertising does - probes on the intimate side of things and exposes them via tuned search or as ad themes.
  - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
    You can just change to the the following experiment: You walk into your local grocery store. A store employee, stops you at the door and asks, 'If you hand over your phone for a second, I will quickly copy over its contents onto my computer. Then, while you shop, I will read through your recent your messages, your emails, your browsing history. Based on that, I will recommend a product or two I think you will find useful. Do we have a deal?' I don't think many people would actually go through with this (rather than just say they would), if we actually did this experiment. Remember, someone got beaten up for wearing google glasses in public and not taking them off when requested. Humans are really bad at thinking in the abstract, but when things are there in the flesh, is when real preferences are revealed.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      Actually, it sounds awesome, provided they recommend a great product I would not otherwise notice, don't spend too much time copying, etc. Not sure what your problem is with that offer.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    > Change the comparison to give me your phone for a day and I'll give you £1000 and suddenly you'll get far more different answers. That may be a better comparison, but with one caveat. If you offer the money in exchange for the phone's data now, the user will balance out the privacy value of what they intuitively believe is on their phone at this very moment. Instead, the offer should be "I'll give you £1000 now in exchange for the right to access all of your phone's data for a day at the time of my choosing, and without you knowing it beforehand or after the fact".
fxtentacle 5y ago
That way of arguing is too clever for the majority of people. Sadly.
bongoman37 5y ago
The problematic part is most people don't care about free speech either.
balabaster 5y ago
Agreed. I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide. "Oh that would never happen today..." https://www.businessinsider.nl/genocides-still-going-on-today-bosnia-2017-11?international=true&r=US https://www.businessinsider.nl/genocides-still-going-on-toda... It's still happening. Anything you say or do no matter how trivial or meaningless could become a vehicle for your annihilation sometime in the future. Those that don't care about their privacy because they have nothing to hide, clearly haven't given enough thought to the repercussions of loss of privacy.
- tpxl 5y ago
  > I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide. Do you have a source for this? I remember reading about similar things, but I can't for the life of me remember the sources to give to others.
  - soco 5y ago
    An interesting Wikipedia read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
    - balabaster 5y ago
      Interesting in this instance is also somewhat sickening.
  - schrijver 5y ago
    See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_...
- voakbasda 5y ago
  This. A thousand times this. Unfortunately very few seem to believe that this scenario is possible, even after pointing out that’s exactly how the Nazis operated. The response is almost always a variation of “It will never happen here.” At which point, I lose a little more hope for the future of humanity.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Nobody knows what will happen in the future. A fascist leader can be voted in at any moment. And his government has access to all this data...
- jeromenerf 5y ago
  … which might be the least of your concerns under a fascist regime. I mean that it doesn’t take an authoritarian regime change for surveillance capabilities to become scary. It could be your neighbor democracy tapping into your national systems, the national company entrusted with public information to misuse them for profit…
- sharikous 5y ago
  To be fair dictatorial regimes are terrible even without advanced technology. Ask someone who lived in the USSR, East Germany, Lybia, Syria, et... Maybe your phone does not snitch on you but your neighbors can
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    Yes, but technology makes the dictatorial regimes more efficient, and increases their reach. Now just imagine a slightly different timeline than our own, in which the coup in January succeeded. Now President for Life Trump takes all Alexa files (and similar from Google and Apple) in existence and scan them for people calling him an asshole. Those people will never get a government job again. If you happened to have called his regime illegal, you get some people in uniform knocking on your door.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    That being true, there is a radical difference in scalability and speed of implementation of an old-fashioned dictatorial regime and the potential that could be achieved with the current ubiquitous technical oligopoly of devices with potential access to voice recordings. Getting a significant proportion of the population loyal or scared enough to snitch on their neighbours takes time and effort, and that's without counting the infrastructure needed to handle and process the reports. Do the snitches phone a government snitchline, write an email, talk to the officer in charge of their sector? How is the specific identity of the people they are snitching on determined? Which bureaucratic level makes the decision to act on a report, are the reports triaged, can you coalesce the data? Now compare that with how comparably fast an authoritarian regime with unlimited access to home recordings could keep control of a population, together with the power of large scale voice recognition and data analysis. What's more, under the right circumstances, it could even be implemented with plausible deniability that the regime is even using this data, in the same way that the British Government (if you forgive the unfortunate analogy) was able to make use of the intelligence gathered by Bletchley Park without the Germans ever suspecting their cryptography was being cracked.
mrweasel 5y ago
There's also a huge difference between keeping something secret and keeping something private. People close and lock the door when they go to the bathroom, but it's not like the rest of us don't know what you do in there. It's just private. Just because there's nothing secret in what I do, doesn't mean that I necessarily comfortable with other people knowing.
ryandvm 5y ago
I'm fairly sympathetic to the "I don't have anything to hide" argument simply because in most cases it's probably true. The reality is that most people don't have much information worth keeping private (beyond authentication information). Nor do most people have a strong use case for free speech protections. I mean, let's be honest, most folks have boring lives and aren't really saying anything interesting. That said, some people do have secrets that could be used against them. And some people do have speech/ideas that are dangerous to entrenched authority. Those things are worth protecting and that's why we must be vigilant. You can't protect the good stuff without also protecting all the banal drivel that the rest of us traffic in.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  It’s a matter of the individual vs collective perspective. In America at least it seems like we have to always find some tie tot he individual because reasoning about collective issues doesn’t gain traction. I may not have anything to hide, but we have something to fear about an all encompassing surveillance society.
- jsmith45 5y ago
  Most people do have some things to hide. I think people would be extremely upset if police started buying real time access to GPS data from your phone in order to more efficiently locate speeding cars (instead of setting up post somewhere and wait for a car they feel is speeding "enough to be worth it", or eventually get board of the spot, and just go after one of random cars that is speeding slightly.) People sometimes do things like planning a surprise for a loved one. sure you might not really care about hiding this from the government, but hiding it from some corporations can be important. Imagine planning a surprise party for your spouse, only to have the surprise ruined by all devices in the house starting to show ads for something you searched for. (I've literally seen this sort of thing happen. I've even had things my parents who live multiple states away look up start showing up in my advertisements, because ad-tech companies correlated a unique identifier for one of my devices with unique identifiers from their devices, because both shared a public IP address for a while when I was visiting a month or so previously.) People generally have many things they would not be comfortable being generally known. Exactly how much money you make. How much debt you have. How many things you bought out of state that you failed to declare use tax on. The fact they they sometimes use piracy sites or torrents to watch movies or shows from services they don't subscribe to. What type of porn they watch. The list goes on. Once again, many (but not all) of those are things people don't really care if the government knows. They may only want to keep this information from people who know them, or even specific individuals. But these are still things to hide.

by dTal 5y ago

baal80spam 5y ago

Personally I prefer: "Oh, you say you have nothing to hide? In this case, how about you lend me your smartphone/laptop for a day, unlocked." This seems simple enough for most people to understand the crazyness of the idea.

raspyberr 5y ago
I really dislike this comparison. I see it everywhere in privacy communities and I think it should die. That comparison doesn't give anything to the other person. Amazon provides a service whilst violating privacy. The person gets something out from having their privacy violated. Hence the reply "it improves my search results". Your comparison would mean they have their privacy violated, they lose access to their phone for a day, and they get nothing to compensate. Change the comparison to give me your phone for a day and I'll give you £1000 and suddenly you'll get far more different answers.
- baal80spam 5y ago
  > That comparison doesn't give anything to the other person Hm, you are correct - I haven't looked at it in this way. I guess it's time for another round of questions around my family and workplace!
- Keyframe 5y ago
  Give me access to your phone and your email for a couple of days - it will improve our conversations, so many topics suddenly! Effectively this is what search and advertising does - probes on the intimate side of things and exposes them via tuned search or as ad themes.
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  You can just change to the the following experiment: You walk into your local grocery store. A store employee, stops you at the door and asks, 'If you hand over your phone for a second, I will quickly copy over its contents onto my computer. Then, while you shop, I will read through your recent your messages, your emails, your browsing history. Based on that, I will recommend a product or two I think you will find useful. Do we have a deal?' I don't think many people would actually go through with this (rather than just say they would), if we actually did this experiment. Remember, someone got beaten up for wearing google glasses in public and not taking them off when requested. Humans are really bad at thinking in the abstract, but when things are there in the flesh, is when real preferences are revealed.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Actually, it sounds awesome, provided they recommend a great product I would not otherwise notice, don't spend too much time copying, etc. Not sure what your problem is with that offer.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  > Change the comparison to give me your phone for a day and I'll give you £1000 and suddenly you'll get far more different answers. That may be a better comparison, but with one caveat. If you offer the money in exchange for the phone's data now, the user will balance out the privacy value of what they intuitively believe is on their phone at this very moment. Instead, the offer should be "I'll give you £1000 now in exchange for the right to access all of your phone's data for a day at the time of my choosing, and without you knowing it beforehand or after the fact".

fxtentacle 5y ago

That way of arguing is too clever for the majority of people. Sadly.

bongoman37 5y ago

The problematic part is most people don't care about free speech either.

balabaster 5y ago

Agreed. I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide. "Oh that would never happen today..." https://www.businessinsider.nl/genocides-still-going-on-today-bosnia-2017-11?international=true&r=US https://www.businessinsider.nl/genocides-still-going-on-toda... It's still happening. Anything you say or do no matter how trivial or meaningless could become a vehicle for your annihilation sometime in the future. Those that don't care about their privacy because they have nothing to hide, clearly haven't given enough thought to the repercussions of loss of privacy.

tpxl 5y ago
> I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide. Do you have a source for this? I remember reading about similar things, but I can't for the life of me remember the sources to give to others.
- soco 5y ago
  An interesting Wikipedia read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
  - balabaster 5y ago
    Interesting in this instance is also somewhat sickening.
- schrijver 5y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_...
voakbasda 5y ago
This. A thousand times this. Unfortunately very few seem to believe that this scenario is possible, even after pointing out that’s exactly how the Nazis operated. The response is almost always a variation of “It will never happen here.” At which point, I lose a little more hope for the future of humanity.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Nobody knows what will happen in the future. A fascist leader can be voted in at any moment. And his government has access to all this data...

jeromenerf 5y ago
… which might be the least of your concerns under a fascist regime. I mean that it doesn’t take an authoritarian regime change for surveillance capabilities to become scary. It could be your neighbor democracy tapping into your national systems, the national company entrusted with public information to misuse them for profit…
sharikous 5y ago
To be fair dictatorial regimes are terrible even without advanced technology. Ask someone who lived in the USSR, East Germany, Lybia, Syria, et... Maybe your phone does not snitch on you but your neighbors can
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  Yes, but technology makes the dictatorial regimes more efficient, and increases their reach. Now just imagine a slightly different timeline than our own, in which the coup in January succeeded. Now President for Life Trump takes all Alexa files (and similar from Google and Apple) in existence and scan them for people calling him an asshole. Those people will never get a government job again. If you happened to have called his regime illegal, you get some people in uniform knocking on your door.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  That being true, there is a radical difference in scalability and speed of implementation of an old-fashioned dictatorial regime and the potential that could be achieved with the current ubiquitous technical oligopoly of devices with potential access to voice recordings. Getting a significant proportion of the population loyal or scared enough to snitch on their neighbours takes time and effort, and that's without counting the infrastructure needed to handle and process the reports. Do the snitches phone a government snitchline, write an email, talk to the officer in charge of their sector? How is the specific identity of the people they are snitching on determined? Which bureaucratic level makes the decision to act on a report, are the reports triaged, can you coalesce the data? Now compare that with how comparably fast an authoritarian regime with unlimited access to home recordings could keep control of a population, together with the power of large scale voice recognition and data analysis. What's more, under the right circumstances, it could even be implemented with plausible deniability that the regime is even using this data, in the same way that the British Government (if you forgive the unfortunate analogy) was able to make use of the intelligence gathered by Bletchley Park without the Germans ever suspecting their cryptography was being cracked.

mrweasel 5y ago

There's also a huge difference between keeping something secret and keeping something private. People close and lock the door when they go to the bathroom, but it's not like the rest of us don't know what you do in there. It's just private. Just because there's nothing secret in what I do, doesn't mean that I necessarily comfortable with other people knowing.

ryandvm 5y ago

I'm fairly sympathetic to the "I don't have anything to hide" argument simply because in most cases it's probably true. The reality is that most people don't have much information worth keeping private (beyond authentication information). Nor do most people have a strong use case for free speech protections. I mean, let's be honest, most folks have boring lives and aren't really saying anything interesting. That said, some people do have secrets that could be used against them. And some people do have speech/ideas that are dangerous to entrenched authority. Those things are worth protecting and that's why we must be vigilant. You can't protect the good stuff without also protecting all the banal drivel that the rest of us traffic in.

wbsss4412 5y ago
It’s a matter of the individual vs collective perspective. In America at least it seems like we have to always find some tie tot he individual because reasoning about collective issues doesn’t gain traction. I may not have anything to hide, but we have something to fear about an all encompassing surveillance society.
jsmith45 5y ago
Most people do have some things to hide. I think people would be extremely upset if police started buying real time access to GPS data from your phone in order to more efficiently locate speeding cars (instead of setting up post somewhere and wait for a car they feel is speeding "enough to be worth it", or eventually get board of the spot, and just go after one of random cars that is speeding slightly.) People sometimes do things like planning a surprise for a loved one. sure you might not really care about hiding this from the government, but hiding it from some corporations can be important. Imagine planning a surprise party for your spouse, only to have the surprise ruined by all devices in the house starting to show ads for something you searched for. (I've literally seen this sort of thing happen. I've even had things my parents who live multiple states away look up start showing up in my advertisements, because ad-tech companies correlated a unique identifier for one of my devices with unique identifiers from their devices, because both shared a public IP address for a while when I was visiting a month or so previously.) People generally have many things they would not be comfortable being generally known. Exactly how much money you make. How much debt you have. How many things you bought out of state that you failed to declare use tax on. The fact they they sometimes use piracy sites or torrents to watch movies or shows from services they don't subscribe to. What type of porn they watch. The list goes on. Once again, many (but not all) of those are things people don't really care if the government knows. They may only want to keep this information from people who know them, or even specific individuals. But these are still things to hide.