22 ms·

‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

• t0bia_s 3y ago
  In this new world we need accept transparency and I'll even say total transparency. Everything going to be transparent and you have to get used to it, you'll have to behave accordingly. It becomes, how should I put it, integrated into your personality, but if you have nothing to hide... you shouldn't be afraid. - Klasu Schwab in 2016, source: https://youtu.be/IJcey1PPiIM?t=414 https://youtu.be/IJcey1PPiIM?t=414
• baxtr 3y ago
  I’m wondering: is there a good list of data privacy failure consequences? There are good lists of breaches but few describing what happened to the people afterwards. Credit card theft resulting in a loss being the most obvious one. Such concrete (real) examples would help me to argue with people who say: all this non-sense about data privacy. What would anyone want to do with your data anyways?
  • Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    > Credit card theft resulting in a loss being the most obvious one. This seems more like a security than a privacy issue. The data (credit card info) is not shared intentionally, but is leaked due to a security hole.
    • maxbond 3y ago
      There isn't such a tight distinction between security and privacy. Consider the Ashley Madison leak. I don't mean to defend people who violate their SO's trust - that's unconscionable - but clearly this was both a privacy and a security issue, data was stolen and leaked which revealed really intimate information which ruined people's lives.
    • dspillett 3y ago
      Credit card issues, and many other forms of fraud, can result from identity theft which is both a security and privacy issue.
  • kkfx 3y ago
    In mere privacy terms? - a women start planning to have a child, her employer know that, she got fired before the conception, legally; - you are someone who know his/shes knows his rights, no jobs for you since you are not easy to exploit; - you have a certain political opinion, not nice toward the present government? You'll got hard career and all possible "issues", just like getting more traffic red lights than someone else, more police checks causing delays and so on. The list is long. The point is: we can't design a society like a factory, we can't plan evolution beyond banal things, so we need noise, variability that nobody can master to ensure nothing can last too much impeding further evolution just because someone manage to grab a certain position of power and do want to end the history to remain there forever in a loop. That's why we need privacy, diversity, and so on.
    • baxtr 3y ago
      Thanks. I was looking for real cases. Theory won't convince the nay-sayers
      • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
        Well, I know that, not too long ago, employers were asking prospective hires to give them their Facebook and Twitter credentials. I'm talking full login credentials. Other ones asked employees to friend them. I think a lot of HR departments also required employees to friend HR people. I'm pretty sure that's documented. The courts slammed that drawer shut, pretty hard. Something that might hit a little closer to home, here: When I was still looking for work, about four or five years ago, a couple of the companies asked me to tell them my HN ID (I'm not sure if I had joined here, back then). That's one of the reasons that I try to behave well, here. I'm not looking for work, but a lot of y'all are. I try not to propagate fights (although it can be tough), because the person that really gets harmed, is the one attacking me. They are showing their ass, in front of potential employers and teammates, and, even though I might not like them, I don't want to play a part in their not getting a job.
      • antihipocrat 3y ago
        Real cases are everywhere, in front of everyone, every day. For example: Victims of domestic violence or stalking. Victims of personal vendettas or bigotry from figures in authority. Victims of exploitative employers. These victims have done nothing wrong and they need privacy. All kinds of people are randomly distributed throughout all professions and strata of society. Politicians, police, lawyers, doctors, posties, real estate agents, chefs. All have great and terrible human representation. Now think about a person you distrust/dislike the most in your life. Would you want to give them access to everything about you? The type of person that you like least will eventually have access to your information. If you don't protect your privacy now, who will protect you then?
  • pinguin3 3y ago
    No list, but here’s a non-US example Torture, rape and imprisonment based on phone data (Belarus 2022)
  • momirlan 3y ago
    ask them to share their email password
    • Karunamon 3y ago
      Not a useful argument; anyone making the "nothing to hide" argument is implicitly arguing the trustworthiness (or the low likelihood of a mistake impacting them) of the state/justice system. You and other members of the general public are not part of that. This is also why the snippy "so you don't have (locks on your doors/blinds on your windows/etc.)?" comeback does not work.
      • jaredhallen 3y ago
        Who makes up the state and justice system? Is it not people?
        • Karunamon 3y ago
          "Officer" is indeed a subclass of "Person", but the former includes a StateAuthority mixin that modifies its acceptable and expected behavior in a number of ways that make it unreasonable to blindly substitute one for the other.
      • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > "nothing to hide" argument is implicitly arguing the trustworthiness (or the low likelihood of a mistake impacting them) of the state/justice system There is a massive assumption that only justice systen will have access to this data. We know this data is sold to anyone, even criminals.
  • sacrosancty 3y ago
    [dead]
  • probably_wrong 3y ago
    I think location data is the best example. First, you have those who stormed the Capitol and were identified by the NYT based on their phones location [1]. You also have the Substack that used location data to publicly out a priest as gay [2]. You then have the companies selling location data of people who visit abortion clinics [3]. They obtain this location from SDKs that they deploy via apps you may already be using. And if you want to get more dystopian remember that Texas allows citizens to sue anyone for "aiding or abetting a post-heartbeat abortion" [4], meaning that driving your friend Rebeca to a clinic can land you in a lawsuit for at least $10k by people who do this as their day job. Even if you're not sued, remember that companies have been reliably predicting whether you're pregnant for at least 10 years [5] and using it to influence your behavior in their favor. This one may be the one with the "least bad" consequences but, paradoxically, the one that better drives home the point since nothing here is criminal. [1] https://archive.is/r6c7b https://archive.is/r6c7b [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-priest-weaponization-app https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-... [3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortion-clinics-safegraph-planned-parenthood https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortio... [4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunters-citizens/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunte... [5] https://archive.is/Z4x2f https://archive.is/Z4x2f
  • Swizec 3y ago
    > I’m wondering: is there a good list of data privacy failure consequences? The ultimate example is how 1940’s Germany used 1930’s Germany’s census data. In 1933 it didn’t seem so bad to tick a box with your religious affiliation …
    • dredmorbius 3y ago
      The Netherlands as well. Dutch census religious affiliation data were used by the imposed regime 1940--45. Several Dutch officials enacted wholesale destruction of those records as the occupation became obviously imminent, which saved many, though the Jewish population of the Netherlands fell from 154,887 in 1941 to 14,346 in 1947. The point being it's not necessarily your own government you need be worried about. In another variant on this, surveillance records kept by the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, a/k/a the Stasi) and Soviet KGB were acquired by successor governments (unified German and post-Soviet states including Ukraine). See: <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/unearthing-soviet-secrets-ukraines-archives https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/unearthing-soviet-sec...> (I'm trying without success to find a reference to the destruction of Dutch census records, though I'm pretty certain this did actually happen.)
      • endgame 3y ago
        > Dutch census records I'm pretty sure I saw this spelled out years ago in a groups.google.com post, but the amnesiac search engines of today are not yielding it up to me. I did find these articles: https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550 https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-h... And one of them references http://web.archive.org/web/20150812120743/https://stadsarchief.amsterdam.nl/presentaties/amsterdamse_schatten/oproer/aanslag_bevolkingsregister/index.nl.html http://web.archive.org/web/20150812120743/https://stadsarchi... (archive link, site is no longer up).
      • MereInterest 3y ago
        There was a dedicated effort by the Dutch resistance to destroy the records of the civil registries. During the occupation, forged documents could be checked against the records in the civil registry. By bombing the civil registry office, the forged papers could no longer be validated against the civil registry, and would pass inspection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_...
  • isanjay 3y ago
    Amy Boyer ?
• alphanullmeric 3y ago
  Unless we’re talking about financial privacy, in which case many alleged privacy supporters will curiously switch sides and defend KYC, transaction tracking and other ways of controlling other people’s wallets.
  • charlieyu1 3y ago
    I don't defend KYC.
  • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    A lot of people just defend the status quo no matter what it is, and the arguments for why things are the way they are now are what they teach in schools and even universities. Most people also don't realize how ineffective KYC laws are. Studies have shown that they just don't work. Small time criminals use cash or barter, big time criminals infiltrate banks or have ties to international criminal organizations with their own shadow banking systems. It's just not a useful requirement and the significant costs outweigh the negligible benefits. Creating a market for shadow banking systems is extra bad because then the large criminal organizations get the bank's margin which they can use to fund more criminal activity. It's only then that we get to the privacy costs and chilling effects of putting everything people buy in a database. And the costs it imposes on marginalized populations. And the destruction of value of any service that can't exist because it would have to collect social security numbers from users or otherwise impose high transaction costs on low margin transactions. I'm not entirely sure who the lobby for keeping them even is. People who don't know how ineffective they are? Banks who want to keep barriers to entry high? Just brute authoritarians who want to spy on everyone every way they can?
  • YeBanKo 3y ago
    Did he somewhere defend KYC? I haven’t heard anyone who defends KYC except a bank teller and a scammy car salesman.
• deepthunder 3y ago
  The problem with the "I've got nothing to hide" argument is it's not "you" who decides what is "right" or "wrong". The entity doing the "spying" determines what is right or wrong. "You" might think "x" is ok, however the "spying" entity may have the opposite view. And it is the "spying" entity's opinion that matters, not yours, because it always them that have the power and authority in determining what is "right" or "wrong". Moreover, definitions change on what is "right" or "wrong".
  • kvdveer 3y ago
    Example: in the 1930, Dutch municipalities would record ethnicity for their citizens. The argument was that ethnicity wasn't something you'd need to hide, and it could be useful should you need to identify yourself. When in 1940 the German occupiers took over, those records turned out to be very useful for their genocide.
    • tremon 3y ago
      would record ethnicity *religious affiliation It makes sense that ethnicity would have been recorded as well, but FAFAIK the Germans mostly used the data on religious identity (i.e. which persons were a member of which church community).
      • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
        And that makes what difference exactly...?
        • civilitty 3y ago
          They’re still doing it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Germany
          • ekianjo 3y ago
            And this is a way you contribute some of your taxes to your religious affiliation
• dataflow 3y ago
  "The argument that, Hey, I don't mind you listening to my phone calls, I have nothing to hide, is not an argument for this. You don't know anybody who does this for a living claiming that that's a good argument. It's a horrible argument. As Americans, we deserve that private space." - Former Director of National Intelligence (Michael Hayden): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV2HDM86XgI&t=1h18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV2HDM86XgI&t=1h18s
• g105b 3y ago
  I also have nothing to hide, but I still choose to close my curtains at night.
  • bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAkZT_4vL_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAkZT_4vL_Y What's he building in there? What the hell is he building in there? He has subscriptions to those magazines He never waves when he goes by He's hiding something from the rest of us He's all to himself I think I know why
• netfortius 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10847842
• ilyt 3y ago
  I found out that asking people that got "nothing to hide so neither should you" to mount a video stream from their bedroom shuts them up right quick.
  • elwell 3y ago
    I don't have anything to hide from a person I can trust.
    • tremon 3y ago
      So what you're saying is that you should be able to determine yourself who you trust with information about yourself?
    • nulld3v 3y ago
      You may trust that the government has good intentions, but do you trust that they properly secure all the information they collect?
    • logdap 3y ago
      [dead]
    • c-linkage 3y ago
      Correction: you don't have anything to hide from a person you believe you can trust. That's how confidence schemes work.
• TuringNYC 3y ago
  YOU: 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' ME: Awesome, can you share your gmail and icloud passwords with me?
  • elwell 3y ago
    YOU: Strawman argument
    • TuringNYC 3y ago
      ME: Logical conclusion
• karaterobot 3y ago
  I got through 16 pages of the article, and he hadn't gotten to the point yet. He was summarizing previous articles he'd written. I understand that he's trying to steelman the "nothing to hide" argument, and has dispensed with the usual retorts (ably summarized in this thread so far). I'd like to know what his real response actually is. Did anybody get through the whole thing?
  • gcanyon 3y ago
    So much this. "I apologize for writing such a long essay; I did not have time to write a shorter one." This is probably too brief, but here's Claude's take on a summary: Here is a one page summary of the article "I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel J. Solove: Solove argues that the "nothing to hide" argument, which contends that there is no threat to privacy if a person has nothing embarrassing or illegal to conceal, stems from a narrow conception of privacy. He proposes a pluralistic framework for understanding privacy, grounded in Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances. Privacy violations consist of a web of related problems, not connected by a common element, but resembling each other. Solove's taxonomy of privacy problems includes four categories: information collection, information processing, information dissemination, and invasion. Harms include chilling effects, power imbalances, breaches of confidentiality, and exclusion from decision-making processes. Many privacy issues cause structural problems rather than individual injuries. The "nothing to hide" argument focuses too narrowly on disclosure of secrets. It fails to account for contextual integrity, social value in keeping promises of confidentiality, dangers of aggregation, problems of exclusion, and difficulties in rebutting predictive prophesies about one's behavior. The debate should center on oversight and accountability procedures, not whether certain government actions should be allowed. In short, by conceptualizing privacy more pluralistically, the deficiencies of the "nothing to hide" argument become apparent.
• chrisnight 3y ago
  Ever since Row v Wade was overturned, the method I've taken in arguments is to point out the now blatantly existing cases of misuse of private data to prosecute people. Many people know about the news now about how people have been arrested and convicted because of phone data that should have been private. I haven't had this argument very often though, so so far there aren't indications as to its effectiveness. We'll have to see how it turns out.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    EFF did a talk on this at Def Con, and yea the amount of digital tracking in your life can be brought to bear by the power of the state is pretty terrifying. Your car, your phones, other people's phones. It's all documenting your life and has few rules in the US.
• philipov 3y ago
  To all those people that have nothing to hide, please provide me with your bank account numbers and mother's maiden name.
  • elwell 3y ago
    The government can have that stuff of mine, but not just any random person.
    • zlg_codes 3y ago
      Why trust an entity that has historically been proven to be untrustworthy? That's like getting punched by your bouncer and still expecting him to be on your side.
      • elwell 3y ago
        So I can get my tax refund direct deposit
        • zlg_codes 3y ago
          Legitimately funny response! But I'm sure you know, if the gov't charged appropriately, you wouldn't get money back, and you'd pay less of your paychecks. They make money on any overpayment, in interest. It's quite disappointing how governments treat their citizens like livestock instead of citizens.
• salad-tycoon 3y ago
  I’ve got plenty to hide, and I hide all my most prized things as best as I can. I enjoy obfuscating things s much as possible just to be a tiny grain of sand of irritation in big data’s crotch. I’m also maybe a bit oppositionally defiant but I enjoy hiding my shit. Why does anyone assume a right to know everyone’s business?
  • someone321 3y ago
    [dead]
    • jansan 3y ago
      > Can you elaborate what you exactly obfuscate ? I would be very disappointed by grandparent if he/she actually does that.
    • alaxapta7 3y ago
      Not OP, but one thing I do is having a fake name on my mailbox and doorbell. I figured my neighbours don't need to know, and parcel services don't care. I don't legally live on that address, so that helps. I also try to keep my browser's headers more generic, especially the Accept-Language header (not applicable or particulary helpful for US residents, though). The rest (VPN, [and therefore] no Google and no social networks) I wouldn't consider an obfuscation.
      • someone321 3y ago
        [dead]
        • alaxapta7 3y ago
          To my fake name (from family and friends), anything official goes to the mailbox at my real address to which I have access to. But that rarely happens thanks to e-government. Because of presumed delivery, there's no benefit in receiving that kind of mail on paper, so I opted-in. For e-mail, I use a domain with a catch-all mailbox. I rot13 the service name or whatever in the local-part to identify where the e-mail got leaked/sold from, which I feel like happens more often than not when buying anything from small e-shops.
• cortic 3y ago
  Posted this three years ago, but its still relevant: My nothing to hide argument; Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surely 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 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. edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many someones.
  • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    This is actually well phrased Its often that we see something thats wrong, but we struggle to express why. This does.
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    A murderer would like to hide their location history from civil justice authorities. We often argue the cons but not the pros of being able to trace history. A lot of ongoing evidence is based on timestamped written communication. Including for the 1/6 indictment, here you could argue what constitutes as "right" or "wrong".
    • avianlyric 3y ago
      What’s more important? Catching every murderer, or protecting the vulnerable from abuses of power? Murder is reprehensible, and I agree that all efforts to catch murderers should be expended. But not at the cost of allowing those in power to abuse their power for personal gain, and retain their power, at the expense of others. Abuses of power are far more common, and in aggregate far more harmful to society, than murder is. Obviously murder is incredibly harmful to those murdered, but if we’re gonna use that to justify privacy invading powers, then why stop there? Cars kills far more people that murderers, a person killed by a car or human is still just as dead. So why not ban all cars?
    • 3y ago
• chacham15 3y ago
  The simplest retort I've heard to "I have nothing to hide" is "then send me a nude photo of yourself." Theres nothing wrong with nude bodies, but it is definitely private. I.e. privacy has nothing to do with hiding wrong/illegal things. (obligatory disclaimer: a little inaccuracy saves a lot of explanation, but I think this gets the gist across)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • wendyshu 3y ago
    Sure, where should I send it?
  • Hanschri 3y ago
    My version is "I have nothing to hide, but I still lock the door when going to the toilet". While I get the point of your retort, I find it can make people defensive and often derails the conversation because it can be interpreted as a gotcha. But that kind of reaction is proof enough that people value privacy. It's just that they don't necessarily think of privacy in their home as the same thing as digital privacy. I'm happy people are more aware about privacy issues and talk about it, everyone and everthing has been mindlessly collecting data for too long, but it looks like things are finally moving in a slightly better direction. At least one can hope :)
  • GuB-42 3y ago
    The article addresses that exact retort, and others in the same style. Here is what it says. > Such responses only attack the nothing to hide argument in its most extreme form, which is not particularly strong. The article is way more nuanced, it makes a point in attacking the real argument and not the strawman. Framing the debate into a privacy/security tradeoff. And btw, my naked body ranks pretty low in the list of things I want to hide. I just don't walk around naked in public because most people wouldn't want me to, it may even be illegal. It is interesting however how a government that says you should have nothing to hide when it comes to surveillance also says that naked bodies must stay hidden.
• zvmaz 3y ago
  Remove privacy (from state and society) and you will live in constant fear of being shunned, ostracized, persecuted. The result is less individuality, less creativity, less exploration.
• tromp 3y ago
  Here's the first listed criticism of the saying on its Wikipedia page [1], by none other than Edward 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
  • glenstein 3y ago
    This one has confused me. A lot of the spirit of it I get behind; I am similarly indignant at the nothing to hide argument, I am similarly appreciative of the value of free speech, and I appreciate the idea that you might hope that you have "something to say", in the sense of having values, or ways in which you are engaged in the world that are important and meaningful to you. And I even understand and support the idea that you are letting a beautiful right go unused if you have "nothing to say." But, with all of those elements in place, I don't see how they serve to counter the "nothing to hide" argument. As other commenters here have pointed out, and as the paper has pointed out, it's (1) nothing to hide, from whom, and (2) just because you believe your actions are innocent, doesn't mean your information won't be used against you to target you. But that's very different than the point that is apparently being made about free speech. It may be a bummer to live a life where you have nothing to say, but the failure implied by that is of a different kind. It may just be that I'm missing an obvious point, but, as far as I can tell, if you have "nothing to say", the problem is that you've resigned yourself to a life that doesn't assert any values or meaning. Meanwhile, the nothing to hide problem relates to not anticipating how bad actors will use your information against you. It would be a 1:1 analogy if the point being made was, well, you have no information? If you have nothing to hide because you have no significant life attributes or life events, I can see a way that is a criticism of an unfulfilled life, and something that makes the comparison to free speech make sense. But... it's kind of lateral to the concerns about privacy that I take to be the most essential to maintaining it as a right. But again, I may just be missing something obvious.
  • the_lego 3y ago
    To elaborate: "nothing to hide" ignores the benefits to society that others, who do have something to hide, bring. Whistleblowers, various lawyers, activists, investigative journalists, labor organizers, etc. Even if you have nothing to hide, you'll benefit immensely when, e.g., people with something to hide reveal your leaders are trying to goad you into a war under false pretenses. To say nothing of how much the perspective changes if you live in a place like Russia or China. Historically, times and places where a good, honest person could bare their life to the government were few. How sure are you this period of relative beneficence of our governments towards its citizens will last, that you dare throw away yours and your children's freedom on the bet your future masters won't mean you harm?
• anotherevan 3y ago
  "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are." https://infosec.exchange/@itisiboller/109472911587284824 https://infosec.exchange/@itisiboller/109472911587284824
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    I'd like to save this quote. However Hackernews provides not much functionality in-platform to do so. Although I will contend the quote needs to be amended, since this doesn't apply to agents whose actions and intentions are questionable, and I would prefer they are not able to hide them.
    • dredmorbius 3y ago
      Vaguely related, there's taoup.fortune: <https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86ac1faa341c https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86...>
    • bondant 3y ago
      Well, you can add it to your favorite comments. Click the on the date on the post and then click on favorite.
    • anotherevan 3y ago
      The link I provided is the original source, if you want to bookmark that. You can also click on the timestamp of a HN comment and get the link just to that, if you prefer to bookmark that. Or there's cut and paste. You have lots of options, it doesn't need to be built in to every web site. Regarding your suggested amendments, sorry, I have no control over what Martin's daughter says.
    • throw0101b 3y ago
      > I'd like to save this quote. $ vi ~/quotations.txt
      • syndicatedjelly 3y ago
• wizofaus 3y ago
  How many people actually believe the "nothing to hide" argument though? I don't doubt some do, but I'm pretty sure most of the pushback against privacy laws etc. comes from corporations who stand to benefit from collecting and selling private information about their customers. Though I will say some of the technical challenges thrown up by some privacy laws are considerable, and trying to comply to them (including being audited etc.) doesn't often feel like the best use of resources.
• GuB-42 3y ago
  PSA: please read the article before commenting. It does a good job defining what is the "nothing to hide" argument in a way that avoids the usual strawmen. The conclusion is also more nuanced and in my opinion way more interesting than what is commonly seen in HN comments.
  • Springtime 3y ago
    Mmm, it's funny since many comments are the exact knee-jerk rebuttals to the titular argument that are deconstructed in the essay.
• throwaway914 3y ago
  I've got nothing to hide.... today. The problem is tomorrow. What's legal today may not be tomorrow. We usually consider "hiding" things to be stuff only criminals do. Society usually makes the right choice on who is a criminal. But society gets it wrong sometimes. Many girls across this nation are hiding their menstrual cycles from school authorities now. I've got everything to hide because it's none of your damn business. What gives you the right to know what I'm hiding? Nothing. And we're just hurting entire generations from developing thoughts and ideals that may benefit society, because our private space gets smaller every year.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Also what will get you imprisoned is only approximately what is illegal and vice versa. You can probably dragnet a good chunk if the population and get a jury to convict them if a crime based on circumstantial evidence. Kind of like p-hacking for justice.
• Madmallard 3y ago
  Having access to sensitive information and potentially even business information confers a competitive edge to the spy. This is the most important and troublesome part.
• loteck 3y ago
  "I've got nothing to hide." Because nobody is trying to hurt you. [0] That you know of. Yet. [0] https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  In the 1970s, Iran looked similar to many Western cultures: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=iran+1970s&qs=MM&form=QBILPG&sp=1&lq=0&pq=iran+1&sc=10-6&cvid=5BAE04219BDB4B4F88DCB9CFAAEEEA67&first=1 https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=iran+1970s&qs=MM&form=Q... That changed literally overnight in 1979. In the US, we had McCarthyism. Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[81] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth... Some weeks back, I started to watch a movie about McCarthyism and didn't make it very far in. It's not really a history we talk that much about, perhaps because it's too disturbing. Americans like to think that sort of thing happens elsewhere, in "bad" places like Russia, not here. But it did happen here and not that long ago and it could happen again -- here or anywhere. Milgram's famous experiments were intended to show that what happened in Nazi Germany was due to some weird character quirk or defect of Germans and couldn't happen elsewhere. His experiment proved the opposite. It proved that a high percentage of people will just do as they are told, up to and including potentially killing someone for no real reason. Milgram suspected before the experiment that the obedience exhibited by Nazis reflected a distinct German character, and planned to use the American participants as a control group before using German participants, expected to behave closer to the Nazis. However, the unexpected results stopped him from conducting the same experiment on German participants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment In order to take an ethical stand at some risk to themselves, people generally need to both feel very clear what is right and wrong in a particular situation and have compelling reason to stick their neck out. People who foment evil generally do all they can to instill doubt of various sorts and deny people full disclosure, which tends to be shockingly easy. Even if the information is available, it can take a great deal of time and effort for a person to adequately educate themselves about a particular thing and this can take too long to act in a decisive and timely fashion to avert an ugly slippery slope.
  • bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    The HUAC wasn’t McCarthy, of course; they are just sort of bound up in the same Red Scare history. It is routine for people outside the USA to conflate these things because of how they are presented in dramatisations; as a Brit I didn’t realise until recently. McCarthy might have been a pivotal figure in McCarthyism (obviously ;-) but he had nothing directly to do with the HUAC because he was a senator. He sat on what is now the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It was the Senate Committee on Government Operations then, which had an enormously broad remit and gave him his ability to harass and persecute anyone who worked for the US federal government. He was also more able to resist pressure because of it.
• matheusmoreira 3y ago
  It's so tiresome having to argue with the exact same "retorts" over and over again. It's like they do it on purpose to wear down people's willingness to resist. It's such a fundamentally thoughtless statement. In every single case, there's a 100% chance the person does have quite a lot of things that they do actively hide, they just haven't thought it through.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    Privacy and politics are like this. If you ever hear someone say "I am non-political" they are a broken shell of a human. Everyone gets political when their state starts making demands of them.
    • NovaDudely 3y ago
      I saw that on youtube once I saw something that is this idea flipped on its head. It was two folks, one of them was trying to talk to the other about politics, the other just shoots him down straight away. Said something like "I was sent to Vietnam war when I was just 16, nobody should ever had to go through that. All because of politicians. Since then I don't want anything to do with politics!". They became apolitical because politics directly broke them. In that situation, I get it. They had been through hell, as far as they are concerned they just want to be left in peace. But as you said, when the state starts forcing their ways on others, that situation of none committal generally goes out the window lest you be trampled.
• simonblack 3y ago
  "Nothing to hide, eh? So give me your credit card details."
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Perhaps this cliche should be changed to "I've got nothing confidential."
• electrondood 3y ago
  "I've got nothing to hide." Cool, then you're fine with me putting a webcam in your bathroom facing your toilet to watch everything you do. Oh wait, it turns out that privacy has intrinsic value.
  • dspillett 3y ago
    Herein we find a concise and accurate assessment of the business model of reality TV!
• teddyh 3y ago
  Much shorter, and only a year older: The Eternal Value of Privacy, by Bruce Schneier in 2006: <https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/>
• renegat0x0 3y ago
  The problem with 'I have nothing to hide' is that it creates a system where everybody has to abide. Everybody needs to be transparent. Everybody's data are exposed to a third party via network effect. It is not essential that Google, or government has my data. It has my friend's data, my techears, my psychologist, my president, my boss data, my wifes data. The third party might use it correctly, but then they can sell it to somebody, to a greedy corporation, to other branches of government. I see a very big potential for abuse.
• fergie 3y ago
  Sad to see how few commenters here have actually read the article.
• teleforce 3y ago
  Highly recommend this new book by Spafford and co for clearing up most of the security misunderstandings [1]. [1] Cybersecurity Myths and Misconceptions: Avoiding the Hazards and Pitfalls that Derail Us: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/cybersecurity-myths-and/9780137929214/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/cybersecurity-myths-and...
• roydivision 3y ago
  I've been looking for a similarly comprehensive summary against the encryption back door argument, can anyone point me to one?
• rendall 3y ago
  I have been watching polite first amendment auditors on YouTube such as Honor Your Oath and Long Island Audit and Too Apree. They will engage in constitutionally protected activity such as video recording or panhandling* in public, or in Too Apree's case, just acting like a goof. Quite eye-opening. All too often a police officer will attempt to run them off at the behest of a government bureaucrat. Overall, these videos reveal that the people who form our government tend to streamline the operation of government for their own convenience and comfort at the expense of the rights and convenience of ordinary citizens. Even the people who have sworn an oath to uphold the rights enshrined in the Constitution all too often do not really understand what those rights are. Or don't care. Or think their job is about something else - keeping citizens in line or something. One must always exercise one's rights or lose them. "I have nothing to hide" is hiding. As The Civil Rights Lawyer says: Freedom is scary. Deal with it. https://www.youtube.com/@HONORYOUROATH https://www.youtube.com/@HONORYOUROATH https://www.youtube.com/@LongIslandAudit https://www.youtube.com/@LongIslandAudit https://www.youtube.com/c/TOOAPREE https://www.youtube.com/c/TOOAPREE https://www.youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer https://www.youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer * Honor Your Oath does not actually panhandle until he is told he cannot panhandle. Then he asks the officer for money.
• nologic01 3y ago
  For a piece that goes deep into the nuances of terminology I feel it is missing substantial broader context relevant for the digital privacy debate: Digital privacy is not a peculiarly US need, nor is it confined to the citizen-state information flows. Social organization in modern times (as seen across the planet) has created three "attractors" through which human agency primarily expresses itself: the individual/household, the (large) commercial entity and the state in its various forms. Of-course only the first type is "real", corporations and governments are legal abstractions representing the interests of various subsets of individuals. Further, the state, despite being a virtual construct, usually has ultimate power to enforce the will of whichever subset it represents. The dramatic challenge of digital privacy is that it applies to every possible pair (e.g. person-to-person, state-to-corporate, corporate-to-corporate, state-to-state etc.) and in all possible governance circumstances (e.g. failed state, captured (oligarchic) state, warring states etc.) not just conditioning on benign scenarios. Discussing digital privacy and rational, human-centric designs of digital society cannot ignore these interconnected elements. E.g. corporate surveillance and state surveillance are obviously deeply linked. Social technologies (of which digital information technology is part of) should aim to remove the likelihood and severity of human-inflicted disasters. 16 years after this piece and 7 years after Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism we are nowhere close to a more serious discussion (let alone action) about the kind of digital societies we are drifting into and what kind of risks are brewing. The control of digital information flow concerning individuals and groups of individuals is at the very center of societal organization. The challenge is not just generational, its epochal. And it is getting worse, with every piece of code that interjects itself in these information flows. Our era is crying out for exceptional intellectual and moral leadership that will construct the canvas on which a good digital society can thrive. Unfortunately, for now at least, not many are listening.
• qwerty456127 3y ago
  Almost all the people overlook how any piece of precise data about them (even the fact they have bought a specific product at a specific shop on a specific day) can be used to easily manipulate them or their family into anything and that any data stored will eventually leak and become available to malevolent actors no matter how benevolent and competent the original data operator was. You can be a perfectly ordinary, lawful and likable person yet get your life ruined at any moment thanks to the tons of data collected about you.
• aflag 3y ago
  You have nothing to hide, but everything you say may be used against you.
• fraserphysics 3y ago
  Society with privacy is different from and preferable to society without privacy. For one example, a lack of privacy enables the identity based political fragmentation that afflicts us. For another example, in developing relationships of any kind, people choose aspects of themselves to reveal to other parties. When negotiating a price, information about the counter party is an advantage.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Anti-"I've got nothing to hide" is a trap for people who didn't think deeply enough about it. Calling "I've got nothing to hide" a "misunderstanding" is itself a misunderstanding. This appeals to people who want to mansplain privacy to the average person, however, these people don't understand the average person. "I've got nothing to hide" taken literally, is, of course, wrong. Everyone has something to hide. Maybe you made a right turn when there was a "no turn on red" sign. If your car was recording every action you ever took and the car company decided to turn all of that data over to the government, congratulations on your fine! However, we shouldn't take things literally. We aren't, as a society, unable to understand subtext, are we? And the context of "I have nothing to hide" is: "I have nothing to hide from the system as it currently is and I am taking a calculated risk that the system is not going to change radically any time soon" The layperson is bad at expressing this deeper concept that they intuit, and why should they be good at it? People are busy living their lives, not everyone wants to become an expert on their own motivations because someone on the internet decided to shove a "You do have something to hide, actually" article in their face.
• ryzvonusef 3y ago
  One of the biggest problem I see with surveillance is not the breach of privacy, but incompetence. See, I live in Pakistan, where we have mandatory ID cards that are required for anything, and the data of which has been leaked, and where you literally don't have a right to privacy, or any other rights, for that matter. So I have no delusion that I have any privacy whatsoever from the government, and frankly I damn care because, after all, it's not like I've done or said anything wrong, I self-censor myself quite strictly. What I fear are mistakes in data collection. Sometime ago, I went to get a copy of my "family tree" (a legal document) upon the passing of my late father, and discovered that by mistake some other people's data had been linked to the same family tree as ours (some typo in the family tree ID field, the rest of the data was clearly distinct). Imagine the consequence had I not asked them to correct this, from inheritance issues, to being picked up by the secret police because some "supposed" family member had done something and they check the database, discover I am "linked" and question me about my none-existent sibling. The fact that I have nothing to hide would be little solace as the police perform rubber-hose decryption on me. Worse yet, with the data breaches, my (outdated) data being in the darknet means loan sharks using it can come harass me for any debts my supposed relative took. There are so many reasons why data security/privacy matters, none of which have to do with hiding anything. I still fear any new additions or deletions in the database since then, but I can't keep going to the HQ and asking to verify my data every day.