Why Privacy Matters Even If “You Have Nothing to Hide”
write.privacytools.io
write.privacytools.io
It is unlikely that you truly have nothing to hide, but it is even more unlikely that every single person who has any influence over your life has nothing to hide. Protecting their privacy prevents exploitation that could hurt you too.
However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be refuted, not reiterated.
Privacy is not about hiding vileness, it was (19th/20th century) about not allowing a totalitarian government to read your private correspondence in search for what they consider dissident opinions. Many people are very lucky that they find this hard to grasp.
Privacy has changed, it had to change because of the "data is the new oil" paradigm. 21st century privacy is your right to choose who can process your data for what. Example: You would never agree that your data is processed by an organization with the purpose of changing your opinion to theirs without ever telling you they are engaging you at all. Yet that is happening, it is called microtargeting.
I didn't express any view on what someone might want to hide, nor why. I'm simply demonstrating that even if someone feels they have no reason to hide anything themselves, it is still in their interests to value privacy unless every other person who might in some way influence their lives also has no reason to hide anything.
You're correct that my argument is an emotional one. I'm appealing to empathy and enlightened self-interest. It's like saying I still support equal rights even if I don't personally belong to some minority group that suffers unjustified discrimination, because I believe a society that treats people fairly is in everyone's best interests, including my own.
There are of course many other issues around what privacy means or should mean in the modern world, and how privacy relates to other concepts like anonymity, pseudonymity, confidentiality, data protection rights and data processing rights. I'm not addressing those issues at all here, because they weren't what the headline was about.
Such a distinction doesn't matter much.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder. E.g. for Southern racists in the 50s, the fact that one supported and funded black rights would seem "evil" as well.
As long as what X (= you or someone you know) said or did appears evil to third parties (government, society at large, their boss, private interests, etc), and leaking this could have negative consequences against X, that's enough to justify the argument made.
Whether the thing is actually evil or good is not really relevant (that implies some fixed moral order for eternity and for everybody within a certain time).
Here in germany the "nothing to hide" argument is mostly used by the spokespeople of the ministry of state security with an implication of crime as defined by the law as written. But let's not focus on the finer points of morality. More important: even if we go from "right to hide some thing evil" to "right to hide some thing" we are not even close to privacy. Because privacy is not about hiding some information about oneself, it is about the right to have some level control about personal information.
A level at which almost everyone suddenly understands privacy is sexuality: no matter if you want to keep your sexuality hidden or not, no matter if you publish on pornhub or not, privacy is the right to not be filmed in your bedroom without your consent. Privacy is not about hiding.
Every one of these is dangerous, but gamified control is by far the worst of these, as it directly attacks the concept of equality which many human rights are fundamentally based on. "Equal access to public service"? Well sure you had the chance to have a good enough score to be allowed in this part of town. It is your own fault that you are a bad human. Giving up privacy will place governance in the hand of unthinking uncaring algorithms. If you the think the human bureaucrats were bad, wait until you experience the automated ones. But even worse: these three mechanisms empower authoritarianism and are easily abused to reinforce power of a ruling caste.
Modern technology makes it easier to ignore the basic human right to privacy than to respect it. I therefor would not compare privacy to free speech, like Snowden does. Free speech is easy. In my opinion it is far more reasonable to compare privacy to the right to a fair trial: having fair trials is significantly harder than despotism. And in a similar way, most people care very little about fairness in court, unless they are directly impaired, and many are willing to throw it away if they believe some evil is using it to hide from justice.
There's no democracy vs dictatorship binary. It's a spectrum.
There are all kinds of things that are legal but the public sentiment is against them, so you want to hide them to protect your social life/career/etc. Being gay in the 70s was one of them. Or a communist sympathizer in the McCarthy era. Many things in 2020 too from both the left and right side (e.g. it's not like the right wingers are safe. For example, news that he donated against a popular progressive cause cost someone his CEO position at a major tech company -- and that's despite the fact that the majority of his state voted in the same vein).
There all also things that are nominally legal but the government/law/local authorities will hold against you in a democracy. Being a peaceful human rights activist would still get you a large folder at the FBI, and in Southern towns could get you harassed by the police.
There are also things you want to keep hidden because you just don't want them public, like your sexual preferences of BDSM or "golden showers", your sex tapes with your partners, your gossip mails or chat against a colleague or boss with a third party, and so on.
If you are in any position of relative power or even small influence (that could stop something, or speak out, etc), then people with interests (from government, industry, etc) can blackmail you with your private information on any of those categories, to vote or do something in their favor or look the other way.
Democracy always progresses through people working against certain laws and customs and cultural ideas. Child labor, women's rights, universal vote, black rights, gay rights, etc. And since those things are established, those people work against laws/majority opinion/powerful interests/etc.
So they do have a need to keep their ideas or moves or who sympathizes secretly, etc secret while they work towards their goal (plus anything else that could be used to blackmail them or hurt them, even if not relevant to that cause - e.g. MLK's affairs had nothing to do with his cause, but they could still be used to discredit him at the time).
And since people are people, even a very good person, working towards a very legit cause, or wanting to prevent some bad from happening, could still have illegal activity of his own that he doesn't want to be made public and hurt them. E.g. they could be doing psychedelic drugs.
I don't see why someone in the US e.g. can be so self-congratulating on "nothing to hide in a democracy", when they had Jim Crow until the 40s, segregation until the 70s, McCarthy, Hoover, Watergate, modern mass surveillance, frequent police abuse (from Serpico to Rodney King to today), lots of scandals and abuses that came into light only by whistleblowers (corporate, governmental, etc), often themselves prosecuted or abused for it, and so on.