I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2014)

Also, one of the hardest-hitting quotes from his book, Permanent Record:

"There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling."

― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, p. 208

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/71198843-permanent-rec...

Yes, in a perfect dream world where governments and agencies are made of perfect, valiant, James Bond kinda characters who fight only for the good causes and are never tempted to misuse the power. In reality, it's obvious that such setup potentially empowers small group of people to with equal ease control and manipulate individuals as well as large groups of people, companies and organizations by means of blackmail and access to insider informations. And the fact how easy and how extremely lucrative that could be just makes it more realistic that someone will try to do that. Lets set aside how tempting it is for most people not to snoop on their exes or current partners, or to run background checks on their daughters new boyfriend, imagine having access to info that some big company is about to default, or that some other company is on the brick of discovering something super exciting and their stocks are about to skyrocket. How many people would realistically resist the urge to monetize that info? How many political parties wouldn't want to know some dirty secret on their opponents? How many ambitious people would just let someone else get promoted even though they know some dirt on them?

Further, since the only reason people would accept this type of surveillance is fear, agencies and governments are directly incentivized by it to prolong and augment the threat, as that directly benefits them and allows them to keep the position of power, to keep their jobs and budgets. Which is less than ideal setup, as it is out of balance by design. As soon as other institutions of the system weaken this will have a tendency to spiral into a fight for grabbing as much power as possible, and then potentially some sort of dictatorship, as has happened in so many societies that had strong security agencies and weak political system.

I'd like to turn the conversation around and question the prioritization of surveillance of the people over the transparency of politicians' communications, sources of funding, who they're meeting with and all such related activities they perform in a role servicing and paid for by the public.

Only once this is addressed should we move down the priority list to "blanket communication and behavioural surveillance of the citizenry."

The potential for harm to a country and it's citizens caused by political decisions is exponentially greater than any act by an individual or group with no political power. (and whilst this point is arguable and weighted with emotion, this includes 9/11).

It's not as formidable as it seems, once you question the premise that perfect enforcement of the laws is a desirable goal. Where, for instance, would the pressure to overturn anti-sodomy statutes come from if it were possible to monitor everyone's illicit sexual activity and pre-emptively embarrass/imprison them to prevent them from coordinating to agitate for their rights? You can replace this example with any ill-conceived outdated law of your choosing; the argument is politics-agnostic and the existence of hundreds of possible examples to draw from illustrates that ossifying our current code by making it possible to perfectly track dissenters is not a great idea for a dynamic society.

> Cast in this manner, the nothing to hide argument is a formidable one.

No. It's still the same old weak argument. "This surveillance will never be used for the wrong reasons and any level of incidental damage to innocents is acceptable, as long as we achieve our goal of preventing people from doing a narrow definition of the wrong thing."

The flaws are this.

(1) not only is there no definition of "the wrong reasons" ("only those who are engaged in illegal activities"), the definition can change, and experience has show that such surveillance data inevitably gets used for purposes outside of the original limited intent. Such primises are not worth the water in which they are writ.

(2) The only acceptable level of incidental damage to innocent parties is zero.

(3) Surveillance is often a form of terrorism. It's a well-documented historic fact (thanks, Stazi, for you predilection for recordkeeping). Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Super easy to rebut by noting that “metadata” reveals the nature of personal connections, legality of certain kinds of personal connections or public associations have proven to be an area the government changes its mind about, and has proven willing to take actions on that destroy lives.

Tomorrow’s moral majority coupled with a total information awareness permanent record and a representative (of the majority) government? You don’t even need much imagination.

The truth relies on vulnerability and is often self incriminating; there are those who would use this information to further their own agendas at the expense of the transparently or naively honest

This does not make the point you're thinking it does.

This makes no sense. Both the paragraphs and the sentences contradict each other while repeating cliches from past discussions on this topic. It reads like a markov bot account. You might want to explain what you mean better.

The way I heard it expressed was "there's a difference between secrecy and privacy; you know exactly what I'm doing in the bathroom but I still don't want you watching."

But how do you separate the two?

And with whom.

Limiting the conversation to what is seen on a webcam doesn’t come close to covering the scope of what could happen.

Let’s say your screen is captured as well. And sometimes that screen will contain personal and private information of friends and family who might care.

It is not your call to decide for them whether their information should be put at risk or not by an organization that has proved itself capable of leaking like a sieve.

You could argue that your devices contain no names of friends or pictures or contact info or messages of any sort with anyone. OK, but that would be pretty unusual.

Saying you don’t care is like driving drunk on an empty road with passengers in the car. You may not care about whether you die, but you have passengers. Your caring about yourself or not isn’t the issue.

And iff the definition of good will never change.

Direct link to PDF: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf

I thought it has something to do with JS or referrer, but in a web browser with those it leads to a 404 error page.

Nope

saying is showing, showing is saying. You've got nothing to say?

I agree, the information that can be gathered and probably has been gathered would constitute an invalid search/seizure for that information to have been got only a few decades ago. Now the information is there for the taking and so whatever personal power struggle with the government is way under gunned. Any one can be squashed at the whim. And ultimately there needs to be a strong press/codes to air/catch the unjust application of the power.