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Comment by raamdev | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of having nothing to hide, the following description of how 'privacy' differs from 'secrecy' really opened my eyes to the importance of the whole privacy issue and why not having anything to hide isn't an excuse to give up your right to privacy: What you do in the bathroom is not a secret, but you still want to close the door—you still want your privacy.

Everyone knows what happens in the bathroom, but everyone also understands that you have a right to your privacy in there and they don't expect you to leave the door open (unless, of course, that's your thing).

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Anyone who says "I don't have anything to hide" I think is making a mistake of thinking that they're the ones who get to decide that. Just look at what happened when John Podestas emails got leaked. The fact that he had talked about food, one of the most innocuous things you could possibly imagine, inspired an unimaginable amount of belligerent morons to construct Rube Goldberg conspiracy theories about child abduction, rape, and murder.

Anyone who says 'I have nothing to hide' really needs to consider things like that, and things like the fact that societal attitudes change. What was perfectly acceptable and normal conversation 25 years ago could absolutely burn you to the ground and ruin your life today if a reliable record of it could be found. When one of Trumps sons somehow gets elected and starts hunting down everyone who spoke ill of his daddy, I don't think "oh but it was accepted at the time" is going to cut it.

That argument still only works when you're preaching to the choir. People can be absolutely against other people looking at them when they're in the bathroom, but at the same time be absolutely fine with The Government being able to retroactively spy on a specific bathroom when they suspect someone did drugs there, i.e. have all bathrooms recorded and the recordings only opened with a court order. Or watched by an algorithm and flagged for review by a person.

But someone might not be doing what everyone thinks they're doing in there.

But we don't have glass doors in bathrooms because of that

Right. Also, my wife and I have a little game of sharing about public restrooms that we encounter. Generally, the men's rooms are far more trashed than the women's rooms. But how many establishments have surveillance cameras in their men's rooms? Not many, I suspect.

Doesn't anyone want to spy on my junk?!

Mostly, I'd think that they'd want to nail the guys who break toilets and urinals. I mean, how to they do that? Those things are solid porcelain, no? Hammers? But maybe they're more fragile than they used to be.

Tons of mens restrooms don't have doors or walls around shitters specifically so no one fucks or does drugs in them.

Where do you live? I've never seen men's rooms that didn't have walls and doors for each stall. I hope you aren't in prison.

Ugh the ones with doors that are like 6 inches off the ground are terrible too.

Its discrimination against men with elephant like appendages.. what a outrage, right?

The same could be said for what you do in your own home with all the curtains pulled.

Yup, my grandma doesn't have curtains because she's doing something illegal... she has them because she doesn't want creeps watching her.

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