8 ms·

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [pdf]

174 points by captn3m0 13y ago

MarkHarmon 13y ago
"Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual based on society’s own norms and values." Was it intended to be "Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual FROM society’s own norms and values."? I want to make sure I'm understanding the concept. The original means to me that the individual is protected by the norms and values of society. The revised version means the individual is protected from society's norms and values. It seems like both should be true.
- mkruso 13y ago
  While I agree with your last statement, I don't think the author made a mistake. His point here is that privacy is about more than protecting the individual for the individual's sake. In context of the preceding paragraphs: Etzioni viewed privacy as a battle between the interests of individuals and society. Dewey proposed that privacy is also a social interest, not just an individual interest. The author is agreeing with the latter: "the value of protecting the individual is a social one." Really, this means both of your interpretations. A society with privacy values protecting individuals from some of its other norms and values. I've never heard of these people before reading this, and I'm not trying to be pedantic. Just my textual interpretation. [edit - for clarity, but I may have made it worse.]
hga 13y ago
Strongly recommended by the libertarian law professor Glenn Reynolds, best known as the Instapundit link blogger, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/ http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/: "It’s the #1 paper on SSRN for all-time downloads, and with good reason."
- dfc 13y ago
  Part of the "good reason" that it is the number one downloaded paper is "the rich get richer" phenomena[1][2] and that it is a paper that is related to online/internet legal scholarship. It is certainly a great paper but most downloaded paper is not a sign that it is the pinnacle of legal scholarship. A recent article about the most cited legal papers of all time had this to say: "With the proliferation of services available for faculty to share their scholarship online, “download” or “view” counts have also become a domi- nant marker of “impact,” particular ly download counts from subject and institutional repositories. (Some full-text research databases and other com- mercial services have begun to refl ect usage statistics in their products. This type of metric differs significantly from citation metrics: it is really a measurement of the “popularity” or visi bility of the article, noting whether an abstract was viewed or visited and whether a link was clicked rather than whether the paper was actually read, thought well of, and used. ... The top downloaded paper of all time on SSRN as of the writing of this Article appears on none of Shapiro’s lists. 81 Furthermore, only one paper on Shapiro’s all-time top 100 list in Table I or recent-articles list in Table II appears in SSRN’s top 100 downloaded papers ( Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark A. Lemley). Of the top 100 downloaded law authors in SSRN, only 15 are on any of Shapiro’s lists. Looking at the au- thors listed in the recent-articles lis t in Table II, the author’s most downloaded paper of all time appears in this list only approximately half the time. It is clear that while arguably a metric in and of itself, being a top downloaded paper in SSRN does not equate with being a top-cited paper of all time. One could argue that an artic le’s presence in newer cited-reference services might potentially provide a new metric, but as with other metrics, it is subject to the volatility of the source content."[3] [1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch18.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/netwo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network [3] http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_and_Pearse_2013.pdf http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_a...
  - hga 13y ago
    "..." I guess all I can say is that you believe you have better insight into the mind of Glenn Reynolds than e.g. I do.
nly 13y ago
Requires registration to download the paper... Mirror: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf
- vollmond 13y ago
  I just clicked the OP link, then clicked "Download this paper" and I had it. I have no account and have never visited SSRN before... EDIT: On clicking "download" a second time, I do get a login page -- but it still has a "download anonymously" option, says you just won't count towards the paper's stats.
  - nly 13y ago
    Yeah, good spot. An Incognito or Private window will also work.
- hga 13y ago
  Echoing vollmond, SSRN may have asked me years ago to register, but I haven't had to for a very long time. Perhaps they're trying to deal with people who try to game the download counts without cleverness, and somehow you got caught up in that mechanism???
susi22 13y ago
Daniel Solove also wrote a longer version of this in his book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338
- Torn 13y ago
  He's written a further compilation of his works in a book titled "Understanding Privacy": http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Privacy-Daniel-J-Solove/dp/0674035070/ http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Privacy-Daniel-J-Solove/... It's a great read, and includes a section on the 'nothing to hide' fallacy
- waster 13y ago
  He also discussed some of his ideas in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/ http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127... .
  - waster 13y ago
    ... which says it's an excerpt from the book.
woodchuck64 13y ago
So people are willing to tolerate the infinitesimal personal risk of an invasion of privacy by the government in order to diminish the infinitesimal personal risk of a terrorist attack. Not sure what all the fuss is about.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Well, the problem comes with how the government uses the data it has on you. Say, for example, I have... 10,000 points of data about you. 10,000 HN posts + Facebook posts + Reddit posts, etc. You've said a lot during your Internet career. I can take what you've written, and form a profile of you from these words. They're just words, you've done nothing wrong. Freedom of speech being what it is, and let's even say you haven't said anything particularly inflammatory. Nothing threatening, nothing dangerous - you're just an average guy. Now, I take these words, and I compare them with words that other folks have said. Using some fancy technology, I can group you with people who say thinks kind of like what you say. Using this data, I can group everyone this way, into clouds. And here's where things get sticky - I can use these clouds of people to look at folks who are "similar" to known terrorists. Folks who, themselves, have done nothing wrong, but who "look" similar to people I know are bad. Let's say, for some reason, you're grouped with someone who has known ties to I dunno... the militant branch of the KKK or whatever. Now you're suddenly interesting to the authorities, even if you've done literally nothing wrong. Or have you? If you're grouped via my super special technology with a terrorist, maybe this puts you on a no-fly list. Maybe this gets your security clearance denied. Maybe you get "randomly" audited. World-ending? No. Completely unwarranted and totally annoying? Yes. On a philosophical level, this is all kinds of against the freedoms we expect to have in America, and that sucks but let's be more practical. People are screaming about the sky falling and the world ending because the NSA knows you like Japanese porn or whatever, but that's not frankly a big deal. What's more likely is that you're going to be annoyed and inconvenienced, and there's not a lot of reason for it. It kind of sucks, and I guess you have to decide for yourself if you're okay with what might happen to someone if they turn out to be a false positive. For me, I don't so much mind the data collection, I just want it to be fully exposed. I want Google, Microsoft, et. al. to have to say publicly when they comply with a request for data, and in a perfect world, I'd want these companies to be required to notify the people whose data they hand over. Does it make it more difficult to catch bad guys? Yes. Does it provide a level of transparency that a representative democracy requires to function properly? Yes. If they collect too much data (or too little!) I want to be able to vote someone out of office. Just saying, "attacks haven't happened so therefore what we're doing is working" isn't something I can buy. Is that too much to ask?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Irregardless 13y ago
"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
- dfc 13y ago
  Do you know where that quote is from? Everything I saw seems to indicate it is from 3 musketeers but I could not find it in the project gutenberg edition or the wikisource version
  - muyuu 13y ago
    I also tried to find this some time ago. The older attribution I found is from "Guillaume le taciturne et sa dynastie. Histoire des Pays-Bas" (1852) It's not exact, it goes like this: "Donnez-moi une ligne, disait-il, la plus indifférente de la main d'un homme, et j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." and it's attributed to Cardinal de Richelieu. It probably has changed in many ways from quotation to quotation, but that is verbatim as I found it in that old book.
- zxcdw 13y ago
  This is a huge problem with a surveillance state. Everyone has something which you can use against them. This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail. Otherwise not. Possible implications to politic balance are astounding.
  - temp453463343 13y ago
    "This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail." Except that's not the reality. The reality is that if Obama really really hates someone and wants to make their life miserable, the most he can do it make it hard for him to fly (ie. the no-fly list). The government is constrained in what it can do, surveillance and omniscience doesn't change that.
    - ctz 13y ago
      The government is constrained in what it can do I'm wondering if you consider the existence of Guantanamo, rendition, etc. to be within or outside these constraints.
dfc 13y ago
Most cited legal paper regarding the right to privacy: The Right to Privacy, Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...
dhughes 13y ago
An interesting take on this at reddit submitted by user 'thenewlove': http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1gdb63/ysk_about_the_base_rate_fallacy_or_why_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1gdb63/ysk_ab... Also mentioned in the post by user 'eleven7' is the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.
420365247 13y ago
Best quote... “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?”
dyanisse 13y ago
Does anyone want to write a summary of this paper in his blog? it would be fantastic!
- waster 13y ago
  Or her?
dasil003 13y ago
I'm all for bringing the most reasoned arguments to bear, but what I think we need immediately are the best way of explaining this to the apathetic and people who buy into the argument by default. We need sound bites, we need tweets and FB messages, we need short commentary that cuts to the heart of the issue in a way that can wake people up. I'm not big into politics, but seeing the apathy in the media and general ignorance of the populace is utterly terrifying. This can only be fixed if we can get a real bi-partisan movement going (which, given the facts, should be a no-brainer) and find a way to counter the fear-based rhetoric that is so easy to package in digestible sound bites for middle America to swallow. Even Ira Glass, from This American Life, who clearly should be better informed was totally "meh" on the issue in the last episode. How can we get people to wake up?
- visarga 13y ago
  Here are my arguments, as many as I could think of (or heard from other people): - There are thousands of laws and regulations, many quite vague in their application. Even the government can't tell their exact number. Are you sure you are not violating any of them? - Even if you've done nothing illegal, if they really have to get you all they need to do is dig dirt on someone close to you. Are you still ok with mass surveillance? Everyone's got a cousin with a drug problem or something similar. - If you want to plan a surprise trip to Hawaii for your spouse, is it OK to want to keep it a secret? Does the "nothing illegal -> nothing to hide" argument hold here? - If you are a creative person, would you like your new novel or album to be leaked from your DropBox, Gmail or some other account to the world? - Why would Apple hide its new products until the official release? Would it be OK for their trade secrets to be laid bare? After all, they are fully legal, thus, nothing to hide? - If you are in business, bidding for contracts, would you like to have your communications observed by potentially rival entities? - You have an email account with spam filters? They can label homosexuals, liberals, tea partiers and such just as easily as they label a spam. - Do you use Google? Google makes use of a network analysis algorithm called Page Rank. In a similar way, Big Brother could rank people by their social influence (I believe FB calls its version 'EdgeRank'). They could get a list of "100 top influencers" in any social network. They could do that with the metadata from phone calls alone. - Would it be OK for the government to know who's organizing protests against them? To have blackmail material on their opponents? - Even with phone metadata alone they could see our social networks and movements. That would give them powerful inside information from what is considered mostly harmless data. It's not in each data point alone, it's in their aggregate that such information emerges. - Is it OK for the government to monitor the communications of lawyers, doctors and psychologists? We entrust them with our most sensitive information. - What will be the impact of mass surveillance on social activism? Don't we need to counter balance the government any more? Do we trust these guys implicitly? - Information is power. Massive, asymmetrical information. They know about you everything, you know nothing about them or how they are using your info. - In the future this database could be leaked and then you'd become blackmail-able by third entities. Imagine what the mafia would do with a database of people's secrets. If Snowden was able to get his hands on it and leak it, don't you think mafia could do the same? They could use a mole inside NSA to extract blackmail material. Hell, NSA might trade information on you with anyone if they get an advantage. Maybe NSA needs to place an informant using the mafia, while mafia wants some dirt on legitimate people and businesses to extract money from them. - In the future all countries will (if they are not already) intercept their digital communications. The logic goes: everyone is doing it, so we need to do it too, otherwise we'd be at a disadvantage and not be able to defend ourselves. Imagine a world in which not just NSA, but hundreds of entities, national or corporate, have data on you. They could use that data for whatever interest they have. You could be indirectly targeted just for being associated with a certain person or company. - Searching terrorists by statistical analysis of people's data doesn't work so well. The problem is mathematical: say there is just one terrorist in a million people. Even if you have a system that is 99.9% accurate, that means 1000 people flagged. That's one thousand false matches for one potential true one. Those people would then be harassed and investigated even though they are innocent. The system is bad in principle. It doesn't do so well on account that terrorists are few and normal people many. If you had a company that produced 999 defected products for every good one, would that be acceptable?
triplesec 13y ago
Don't forget this classic, relevant to this, and pertinent to other news since the 5th amendment decision is rather current today: Don't talk to Police (Top Law Prof and Cop tell you why) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

174 points by captn3m0 13y ago

"Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual based on society’s own norms and values." Was it intended to be "Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual FROM society’s own norms and values."? I want to make sure I'm understanding the concept. The original means to me that the individual is protected by the norms and values of society. The revised version means the individual is protected from society's norms and values. It seems like both should be true.

mkruso 13y ago
While I agree with your last statement, I don't think the author made a mistake. His point here is that privacy is about more than protecting the individual for the individual's sake. In context of the preceding paragraphs: Etzioni viewed privacy as a battle between the interests of individuals and society. Dewey proposed that privacy is also a social interest, not just an individual interest. The author is agreeing with the latter: "the value of protecting the individual is a social one." Really, this means both of your interpretations. A society with privacy values protecting individuals from some of its other norms and values. I've never heard of these people before reading this, and I'm not trying to be pedantic. Just my textual interpretation. [edit - for clarity, but I may have made it worse.]

hga 13y ago

Strongly recommended by the libertarian law professor Glenn Reynolds, best known as the Instapundit link blogger, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/ http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/: "It’s the #1 paper on SSRN for all-time downloads, and with good reason."

dfc 13y ago
Part of the "good reason" that it is the number one downloaded paper is "the rich get richer" phenomena[1][2] and that it is a paper that is related to online/internet legal scholarship. It is certainly a great paper but most downloaded paper is not a sign that it is the pinnacle of legal scholarship. A recent article about the most cited legal papers of all time had this to say: "With the proliferation of services available for faculty to share their scholarship online, “download” or “view” counts have also become a domi- nant marker of “impact,” particular ly download counts from subject and institutional repositories. (Some full-text research databases and other com- mercial services have begun to refl ect usage statistics in their products. This type of metric differs significantly from citation metrics: it is really a measurement of the “popularity” or visi bility of the article, noting whether an abstract was viewed or visited and whether a link was clicked rather than whether the paper was actually read, thought well of, and used. ... The top downloaded paper of all time on SSRN as of the writing of this Article appears on none of Shapiro’s lists. 81 Furthermore, only one paper on Shapiro’s all-time top 100 list in Table I or recent-articles list in Table II appears in SSRN’s top 100 downloaded papers ( Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark A. Lemley). Of the top 100 downloaded law authors in SSRN, only 15 are on any of Shapiro’s lists. Looking at the au- thors listed in the recent-articles lis t in Table II, the author’s most downloaded paper of all time appears in this list only approximately half the time. It is clear that while arguably a metric in and of itself, being a top downloaded paper in SSRN does not equate with being a top-cited paper of all time. One could argue that an artic le’s presence in newer cited-reference services might potentially provide a new metric, but as with other metrics, it is subject to the volatility of the source content."[3] [1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch18.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/netwo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network [3] http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_and_Pearse_2013.pdf http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_a...
- hga 13y ago
  "..." I guess all I can say is that you believe you have better insight into the mind of Glenn Reynolds than e.g. I do.

nly 13y ago

Requires registration to download the paper... Mirror: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf

vollmond 13y ago
I just clicked the OP link, then clicked "Download this paper" and I had it. I have no account and have never visited SSRN before... EDIT: On clicking "download" a second time, I do get a login page -- but it still has a "download anonymously" option, says you just won't count towards the paper's stats.
- nly 13y ago
  Yeah, good spot. An Incognito or Private window will also work.
hga 13y ago
Echoing vollmond, SSRN may have asked me years ago to register, but I haven't had to for a very long time. Perhaps they're trying to deal with people who try to game the download counts without cleverness, and somehow you got caught up in that mechanism???

susi22 13y ago

Daniel Solove also wrote a longer version of this in his book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338

Torn 13y ago
He's written a further compilation of his works in a book titled "Understanding Privacy": http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Privacy-Daniel-J-Solove/dp/0674035070/ http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Privacy-Daniel-J-Solove/... It's a great read, and includes a section on the 'nothing to hide' fallacy
waster 13y ago
He also discussed some of his ideas in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/ http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127... .
- waster 13y ago
  ... which says it's an excerpt from the book.

woodchuck64 13y ago

So people are willing to tolerate the infinitesimal personal risk of an invasion of privacy by the government in order to diminish the infinitesimal personal risk of a terrorist attack. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

diminoten 13y ago
Well, the problem comes with how the government uses the data it has on you. Say, for example, I have... 10,000 points of data about you. 10,000 HN posts + Facebook posts + Reddit posts, etc. You've said a lot during your Internet career. I can take what you've written, and form a profile of you from these words. They're just words, you've done nothing wrong. Freedom of speech being what it is, and let's even say you haven't said anything particularly inflammatory. Nothing threatening, nothing dangerous - you're just an average guy. Now, I take these words, and I compare them with words that other folks have said. Using some fancy technology, I can group you with people who say thinks kind of like what you say. Using this data, I can group everyone this way, into clouds. And here's where things get sticky - I can use these clouds of people to look at folks who are "similar" to known terrorists. Folks who, themselves, have done nothing wrong, but who "look" similar to people I know are bad. Let's say, for some reason, you're grouped with someone who has known ties to I dunno... the militant branch of the KKK or whatever. Now you're suddenly interesting to the authorities, even if you've done literally nothing wrong. Or have you? If you're grouped via my super special technology with a terrorist, maybe this puts you on a no-fly list. Maybe this gets your security clearance denied. Maybe you get "randomly" audited. World-ending? No. Completely unwarranted and totally annoying? Yes. On a philosophical level, this is all kinds of against the freedoms we expect to have in America, and that sucks but let's be more practical. People are screaming about the sky falling and the world ending because the NSA knows you like Japanese porn or whatever, but that's not frankly a big deal. What's more likely is that you're going to be annoyed and inconvenienced, and there's not a lot of reason for it. It kind of sucks, and I guess you have to decide for yourself if you're okay with what might happen to someone if they turn out to be a false positive. For me, I don't so much mind the data collection, I just want it to be fully exposed. I want Google, Microsoft, et. al. to have to say publicly when they comply with a request for data, and in a perfect world, I'd want these companies to be required to notify the people whose data they hand over. Does it make it more difficult to catch bad guys? Yes. Does it provide a level of transparency that a representative democracy requires to function properly? Yes. If they collect too much data (or too little!) I want to be able to vote someone out of office. Just saying, "attacks haven't happened so therefore what we're doing is working" isn't something I can buy. Is that too much to ask?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Irregardless 13y ago

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu

dfc 13y ago
Do you know where that quote is from? Everything I saw seems to indicate it is from 3 musketeers but I could not find it in the project gutenberg edition or the wikisource version
- muyuu 13y ago
  I also tried to find this some time ago. The older attribution I found is from "Guillaume le taciturne et sa dynastie. Histoire des Pays-Bas" (1852) It's not exact, it goes like this: "Donnez-moi une ligne, disait-il, la plus indifférente de la main d'un homme, et j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." and it's attributed to Cardinal de Richelieu. It probably has changed in many ways from quotation to quotation, but that is verbatim as I found it in that old book.
zxcdw 13y ago
This is a huge problem with a surveillance state. Everyone has something which you can use against them. This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail. Otherwise not. Possible implications to politic balance are astounding.
- temp453463343 13y ago
  "This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail." Except that's not the reality. The reality is that if Obama really really hates someone and wants to make their life miserable, the most he can do it make it hard for him to fly (ie. the no-fly list). The government is constrained in what it can do, surveillance and omniscience doesn't change that.
  - ctz 13y ago
    The government is constrained in what it can do I'm wondering if you consider the existence of Guantanamo, rendition, etc. to be within or outside these constraints.

dfc 13y ago

Most cited legal paper regarding the right to privacy: The Right to Privacy, Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...

dhughes 13y ago

An interesting take on this at reddit submitted by user 'thenewlove': http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1gdb63/ysk_about_the_base_rate_fallacy_or_why_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1gdb63/ysk_ab... Also mentioned in the post by user 'eleven7' is the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

420365247 13y ago

Best quote... “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?”

dyanisse 13y ago

Does anyone want to write a summary of this paper in his blog? it would be fantastic!

waster 13y ago
Or her?

dasil003 13y ago

I'm all for bringing the most reasoned arguments to bear, but what I think we need immediately are the best way of explaining this to the apathetic and people who buy into the argument by default. We need sound bites, we need tweets and FB messages, we need short commentary that cuts to the heart of the issue in a way that can wake people up. I'm not big into politics, but seeing the apathy in the media and general ignorance of the populace is utterly terrifying. This can only be fixed if we can get a real bi-partisan movement going (which, given the facts, should be a no-brainer) and find a way to counter the fear-based rhetoric that is so easy to package in digestible sound bites for middle America to swallow. Even Ira Glass, from This American Life, who clearly should be better informed was totally "meh" on the issue in the last episode. How can we get people to wake up?

visarga 13y ago
Here are my arguments, as many as I could think of (or heard from other people): - There are thousands of laws and regulations, many quite vague in their application. Even the government can't tell their exact number. Are you sure you are not violating any of them? - Even if you've done nothing illegal, if they really have to get you all they need to do is dig dirt on someone close to you. Are you still ok with mass surveillance? Everyone's got a cousin with a drug problem or something similar. - If you want to plan a surprise trip to Hawaii for your spouse, is it OK to want to keep it a secret? Does the "nothing illegal -> nothing to hide" argument hold here? - If you are a creative person, would you like your new novel or album to be leaked from your DropBox, Gmail or some other account to the world? - Why would Apple hide its new products until the official release? Would it be OK for their trade secrets to be laid bare? After all, they are fully legal, thus, nothing to hide? - If you are in business, bidding for contracts, would you like to have your communications observed by potentially rival entities? - You have an email account with spam filters? They can label homosexuals, liberals, tea partiers and such just as easily as they label a spam. - Do you use Google? Google makes use of a network analysis algorithm called Page Rank. In a similar way, Big Brother could rank people by their social influence (I believe FB calls its version 'EdgeRank'). They could get a list of "100 top influencers" in any social network. They could do that with the metadata from phone calls alone. - Would it be OK for the government to know who's organizing protests against them? To have blackmail material on their opponents? - Even with phone metadata alone they could see our social networks and movements. That would give them powerful inside information from what is considered mostly harmless data. It's not in each data point alone, it's in their aggregate that such information emerges. - Is it OK for the government to monitor the communications of lawyers, doctors and psychologists? We entrust them with our most sensitive information. - What will be the impact of mass surveillance on social activism? Don't we need to counter balance the government any more? Do we trust these guys implicitly? - Information is power. Massive, asymmetrical information. They know about you everything, you know nothing about them or how they are using your info. - In the future this database could be leaked and then you'd become blackmail-able by third entities. Imagine what the mafia would do with a database of people's secrets. If Snowden was able to get his hands on it and leak it, don't you think mafia could do the same? They could use a mole inside NSA to extract blackmail material. Hell, NSA might trade information on you with anyone if they get an advantage. Maybe NSA needs to place an informant using the mafia, while mafia wants some dirt on legitimate people and businesses to extract money from them. - In the future all countries will (if they are not already) intercept their digital communications. The logic goes: everyone is doing it, so we need to do it too, otherwise we'd be at a disadvantage and not be able to defend ourselves. Imagine a world in which not just NSA, but hundreds of entities, national or corporate, have data on you. They could use that data for whatever interest they have. You could be indirectly targeted just for being associated with a certain person or company. - Searching terrorists by statistical analysis of people's data doesn't work so well. The problem is mathematical: say there is just one terrorist in a million people. Even if you have a system that is 99.9% accurate, that means 1000 people flagged. That's one thousand false matches for one potential true one. Those people would then be harassed and investigated even though they are innocent. The system is bad in principle. It doesn't do so well on account that terrorists are few and normal people many. If you had a company that produced 999 defected products for every good one, would that be acceptable?

triplesec 13y ago

Don't forget this classic, relevant to this, and pertinent to other news since the 5th amendment decision is rather current today: Don't talk to Police (Top Law Prof and Cop tell you why) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc