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“ If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.” I’m surprised to see someone advocating for “if you haven’t done anyth

“ If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.” I’m surprised to see someone advocating for “if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to hide” on HN. The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here!

refulgentis 2y ago
It's not that, though, I understand the temptation to `sed` what they said into that. It's easier, more fun, and its much more work to come with curiosity.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  There's nothing here to be curious about, just the usual "corporations bad". It's easy to mistake an emotion for an idea but it isn't. I'd normally pass it by entirely with an eye roll, I just thought it was funny that it's the opposite of how they'd feel if talking about people in their personal lives, completely unaware that these are the same people at just a different time of day.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    > There's nothing here to be curious about, just the usual "corporations bad" I'm sorry to be abrupt, but thats not true. We can see that empirically. For instance, you are talking to someone who read it and thinks that's a simplistic caricature of what they said. So we can dispense with the idea your rephrasing is equivalent. That's indisputable. There's a good quote about this in Rand, something something faced with a contradiction check your premises. When we jump to these kind of reactions, it's an annoying responsibility to pause and sigh, and engage on some level beyond "I'm sick of people saying (something they didn't say)"
    - mattmaroon 2y ago
      It’s clearly not indisputable as it has been disputed. And I was responding directly to something someone did say. (That person did not say that the same logic doesn’t apply out of the office, I did infer that part.) But both the “corporations are bad” mind virus (which is no more interesting than flat earth theories) and the idea that individuals want and deserve privacy even when acting morally and legally are so widely held here that I’m sure that Venn Diagram is like 90% the overlap part. The post to which I was replying may not be in it, I have no idea. I wanted to point it out so people could see it clearly in case anyone caught it. I’m sure a lot of people felt some cognitive dissonance by agreeing with both and didn’t realize it, as one rarely does. The original idea to which parent was replying actually was interesting. If nothing can be deleted, corporations (and people, when not at work) can be hampered and pushed into other forms of communication, other actions, etc. which can then even grow to be nefarious. That one’s interesting, “if what you said could be evidence then you did something wrong just because you were at work” isn’t, it’s just silly. It’s child logic.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    It's not, though. It's people in an entirely different context, acting as an agent of a legal entity that is regulated and has restrictions on the things it can do. This is the same reason why I think police should be recorded when they are out on duty. A person gets to have the right to privacy, but the police, while on duty, should not have that right, given that they have the ability to legally kill someone, among other things. If you (police, large corporation) are granted the legal ability to do harm on a large scale, then you also need checks to ensure those abilities are not being abused.
kibwen 2y ago
No, please stop with this false equivalence. People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.
- normalaccess 2y ago
  As much as I dislike corporations I dislike a tyranny even more. A cooperation is not magic, they are just collections of people. Each person in a cooperation should be afforded the same rights as each person outside a cooperation. Are your personal phone records, emails, text messages stored /just in case/ you commit a crime? Once you define a class as having less rights (for better or worse) you've created a breach. The 4th and 5th Amendment: 4th: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 5th: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  It's not false equivalence, we were talking about communications between people. Corporations don't write emails, people do. A corporation, big or small, is just a legal way of definining the property of people, and the people who work for it (who may or may not also own some of it) are people. Communications between them are communications between people. What they're saying is that people deserve privacy, unless what they're doing has some relationship to making money, in which case they do not.
simoncion 2y ago
> The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here! That's overly glib. Large and megacos should be held to a higher standard than ordinary folks and small mom-and-pop shops. A decent rule could be "If you have an army of lawyers (whether on retainer or on staff), you're presumed to have a far higher-than-normal understanding of the law relevant to your business and get far less lenience and forbearance from the courts.". Yes, I know that's not how it works today. I'm saying that it SHOULD work that, maybe after a six or twelve month advance notice period.
- arccy 2y ago
  that understanding has obviously been that the people who wield the law are highly adversarial, so it is in their best interest to conceal as much as possible
katdork 2y ago
financial and corporate transparency and privacy are a very different matter to the transparency and privacy of an individual. despite the whackadoodle precedent that corporations are people, corporations are not people. they may be made of people, but the affairs of those people are within the course of their employment, acting on behalf of the corporation.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  There is actually no precedent that corporations are people. That isn't what corporate personhood means.
solarkraft 2y ago
Corporations are not people. What a single person does while not affecting anyone else is nobody’s business, but what companies do affects a lot of people, hence it is other peoples’ business.
- blacksmith_tb 2y ago
  I wish that were true, but in the US at least[1], it isn't cut and dried. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
- scripturial 2y ago
  This is simplistic thinking. Companies can’t do anything. People do things, sometimes as a functioning part of an organization. Companies don’t decide to cut down trees for profit, people decide to take that action. When you say “a company is damaging the environment” you’re allowing a person to hide anonymously under the veil of a legal entity. Companies can’t do anything. Only people do things.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Seems to me the solution is end the liability shield incorporations provides.
    - mattmaroon 2y ago
      That would be a great way to tank the economy.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Then anyone with money will be too afraid to invest or operate a corporation. Rapid, screeching halt to the economy.
      - scripturial 2y ago
        To carry through the analogy, yes, people should be afraid to deliberately and intentionally knowingly conduct illegal activity under the guise of a company.
eftychis 2y ago
There is a difference between keeping one's privacy and actively abusing and masquerading attorney client privilege to conceal criminal actions, knowing they are criminal actions. Because that is what Google was doing. They knew extremely well how they were violating the law and the implications. And even worse, actively recruiting individuals to commit obstruction of justice and evidence spoliation (two distinct categories), so you as a company can thrive from crime a few more years. The law is there to protect consumers. Privacy law is there to protect everyone. Google could have easily said: I have the evidence, but I plead the fifth and not going to provide that evidence that you seek in discovery. The issue of course is in civil proceedings this means, the Court can instruct adverse inference or strike the pleadings -- that is a default judgment.
- tetromino_ 2y ago
  That's not how any of this works, at all. Please take the time to at least take a look an introductory Wikipedia article about the legal system. (For starters, "pleading the fifth" applies only to testimony of a human being which may cause him to be personally accused of a crime. It has zero relevance to the question of accessing archived emails and chat logs sitting on a hard drive which is owned by a corporation accused of a civil violation.)
to11mtm 2y ago
If anything it speaks to the volumes of times that folks are pressured into doing something that is probably illegal but they won't get whistleblower protection on.
jojobas 2y ago
Conflating personal privacy with corporate secrecy is arguing in bad faith.
dredmorbius 2y ago
Rather famously, that sentiment is parlous close to something Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) once said, which makes the irony deliciously palpable: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...> (2009).

refulgentis 2y ago

It's not that, though, I understand the temptation to `sed` what they said into that. It's easier, more fun, and its much more work to come with curiosity.

mattmaroon 2y ago
There's nothing here to be curious about, just the usual "corporations bad". It's easy to mistake an emotion for an idea but it isn't. I'd normally pass it by entirely with an eye roll, I just thought it was funny that it's the opposite of how they'd feel if talking about people in their personal lives, completely unaware that these are the same people at just a different time of day.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  > There's nothing here to be curious about, just the usual "corporations bad" I'm sorry to be abrupt, but thats not true. We can see that empirically. For instance, you are talking to someone who read it and thinks that's a simplistic caricature of what they said. So we can dispense with the idea your rephrasing is equivalent. That's indisputable. There's a good quote about this in Rand, something something faced with a contradiction check your premises. When we jump to these kind of reactions, it's an annoying responsibility to pause and sigh, and engage on some level beyond "I'm sick of people saying (something they didn't say)"
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    It’s clearly not indisputable as it has been disputed. And I was responding directly to something someone did say. (That person did not say that the same logic doesn’t apply out of the office, I did infer that part.) But both the “corporations are bad” mind virus (which is no more interesting than flat earth theories) and the idea that individuals want and deserve privacy even when acting morally and legally are so widely held here that I’m sure that Venn Diagram is like 90% the overlap part. The post to which I was replying may not be in it, I have no idea. I wanted to point it out so people could see it clearly in case anyone caught it. I’m sure a lot of people felt some cognitive dissonance by agreeing with both and didn’t realize it, as one rarely does. The original idea to which parent was replying actually was interesting. If nothing can be deleted, corporations (and people, when not at work) can be hampered and pushed into other forms of communication, other actions, etc. which can then even grow to be nefarious. That one’s interesting, “if what you said could be evidence then you did something wrong just because you were at work” isn’t, it’s just silly. It’s child logic.
- kelnos 2y ago
  It's not, though. It's people in an entirely different context, acting as an agent of a legal entity that is regulated and has restrictions on the things it can do. This is the same reason why I think police should be recorded when they are out on duty. A person gets to have the right to privacy, but the police, while on duty, should not have that right, given that they have the ability to legally kill someone, among other things. If you (police, large corporation) are granted the legal ability to do harm on a large scale, then you also need checks to ensure those abilities are not being abused.

kibwen 2y ago

No, please stop with this false equivalence. People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.

normalaccess 2y ago
As much as I dislike corporations I dislike a tyranny even more. A cooperation is not magic, they are just collections of people. Each person in a cooperation should be afforded the same rights as each person outside a cooperation. Are your personal phone records, emails, text messages stored /just in case/ you commit a crime? Once you define a class as having less rights (for better or worse) you've created a breach. The 4th and 5th Amendment: 4th: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 5th: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mattmaroon 2y ago
It's not false equivalence, we were talking about communications between people. Corporations don't write emails, people do. A corporation, big or small, is just a legal way of definining the property of people, and the people who work for it (who may or may not also own some of it) are people. Communications between them are communications between people. What they're saying is that people deserve privacy, unless what they're doing has some relationship to making money, in which case they do not.

simoncion 2y ago

> The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here! That's overly glib. Large and megacos should be held to a higher standard than ordinary folks and small mom-and-pop shops. A decent rule could be "If you have an army of lawyers (whether on retainer or on staff), you're presumed to have a far higher-than-normal understanding of the law relevant to your business and get far less lenience and forbearance from the courts.". Yes, I know that's not how it works today. I'm saying that it SHOULD work that, maybe after a six or twelve month advance notice period.

arccy 2y ago
that understanding has obviously been that the people who wield the law are highly adversarial, so it is in their best interest to conceal as much as possible

katdork 2y ago

financial and corporate transparency and privacy are a very different matter to the transparency and privacy of an individual. despite the whackadoodle precedent that corporations are people, corporations are not people. they may be made of people, but the affairs of those people are within the course of their employment, acting on behalf of the corporation.

mattmaroon 2y ago
There is actually no precedent that corporations are people. That isn't what corporate personhood means.

solarkraft 2y ago

Corporations are not people. What a single person does while not affecting anyone else is nobody’s business, but what companies do affects a lot of people, hence it is other peoples’ business.

blacksmith_tb 2y ago
I wish that were true, but in the US at least[1], it isn't cut and dried. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
scripturial 2y ago
This is simplistic thinking. Companies can’t do anything. People do things, sometimes as a functioning part of an organization. Companies don’t decide to cut down trees for profit, people decide to take that action. When you say “a company is damaging the environment” you’re allowing a person to hide anonymously under the veil of a legal entity. Companies can’t do anything. Only people do things.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Seems to me the solution is end the liability shield incorporations provides.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    That would be a great way to tank the economy.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Then anyone with money will be too afraid to invest or operate a corporation. Rapid, screeching halt to the economy.
    - scripturial 2y ago
      To carry through the analogy, yes, people should be afraid to deliberately and intentionally knowingly conduct illegal activity under the guise of a company.

eftychis 2y ago

There is a difference between keeping one's privacy and actively abusing and masquerading attorney client privilege to conceal criminal actions, knowing they are criminal actions. Because that is what Google was doing. They knew extremely well how they were violating the law and the implications. And even worse, actively recruiting individuals to commit obstruction of justice and evidence spoliation (two distinct categories), so you as a company can thrive from crime a few more years. The law is there to protect consumers. Privacy law is there to protect everyone. Google could have easily said: I have the evidence, but I plead the fifth and not going to provide that evidence that you seek in discovery. The issue of course is in civil proceedings this means, the Court can instruct adverse inference or strike the pleadings -- that is a default judgment.

tetromino_ 2y ago
That's not how any of this works, at all. Please take the time to at least take a look an introductory Wikipedia article about the legal system. (For starters, "pleading the fifth" applies only to testimony of a human being which may cause him to be personally accused of a crime. It has zero relevance to the question of accessing archived emails and chat logs sitting on a hard drive which is owned by a corporation accused of a civil violation.)

to11mtm 2y ago

If anything it speaks to the volumes of times that folks are pressured into doing something that is probably illegal but they won't get whistleblower protection on.

jojobas 2y ago

Conflating personal privacy with corporate secrecy is arguing in bad faith.

dredmorbius 2y ago

Rather famously, that sentiment is parlous close to something Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) once said, which makes the irony deliciously palpable: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...> (2009).