Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

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This smacks to me of an "If you have nothing to hide why do you care about your privacy?" argument. Which we should all know is a major fallacy.

There's plenty of reasons to not want others looking over your shoulder that have nothing to do with goofing off. Private emails, even totally business related ones are just that, private. If you're struggling with a problem, having an audience can make it that much worse. Et cetera, et cetera.

The nature of software development makes it hard for a lot of people to do with lots of distractions around them.

- There's also way too much stigma against "time wasting." Your brain needs breaks and distractions to work through problems. Spending some time on a goof off site each day is not a bad thing in and of itself. If your productivity suffers, that's a problem that needs to be addressed. But it can happen via burn out just as easily as via spending too much time reading fan theories on Infinity War Pt. 2.

> This smacks to me of an "If you have nothing to hide why do you care about your privacy?" argument. Which we should all know is a major fallacy.

The fallacy here is conflating the two. To me the most important argument in the usual privacy conversation (i.e. people vs government) is that people defending themselves from government surveillance is a very important part of keeping the balance of power from swinging too much in one direction.

This is nothing of the sort. If you work for a business and you don't like their open-plan offices, find one where they don't have open-plan offices. But saying that you don't like their open-plan offices because you're so productive without distractions, but then you're afraid that people see your screen seems dishonest. Also, if you're super productive but you need to take breaks to look at cat pictures during office hours, why are you afraid that someone will catch you looking at cat pictures? If you actually are as productive as you claim I'm sure people will respect your need for breaks: after all according to you we all need breaks, so "other people" will be doing the same thing. And if they don't respect _your_ need for breaks, then the problem isn't really the office style, but a lack of trust in colleagues. Again, the entire thing seems dishonest.

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