'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2007) | Hacker News Reader

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2007)

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49 pointsfreddyym13 comments

Discussed 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21416115

(The cutoff for reposts is a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

Also, a thread from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899784

and from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957864

The quip "if you've got nothing to hide, then why don't you write all your letters on postcards?" got people thinking about privacy back in the day. Unfortunately, people don't use regular mail anymore. And what's even sadder is that we ultimately ended up writing all of our letters on postcards with email.

Seems like there should be some middle ground. Everyone agrees that people should be entitled to some privacy under certain circumstances. But the camp advocating absolute privacy by-default 24/7/365 is too extreme, imo.

There are many societal illnesses that both emerge and are difficult to solve when everyone is untracably anonymous. Lack of privacy provides a feedback mechanism by which corrective action can be taken.

What a magnificent piece of misdirection and mind manipulation. You should not try to pull a fast one with cheap propaganda tricks on HN readers, that won't work most of the time.

> there should be some middle ground

argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy

> the camp advocating absolute privacy by-default 24/7/365 is too extreme

People who speak in favour of exercising a basic human rights are labelled extremists.

> everyone is untracably anonymous

Shifting of the goal-post: privacy is not the same as anonymity.

> People who speak in favour of exercising a basic human rights are labelled extremists.

No, not extremists, more like the Patriot Act has been in place since 2001 and other things like Facebook running most people's lives (maybe not you, but 1+ billion other people) are a fact of life now, and has been for decades. If someone says we must have privacy, I'd say sure, but that's not how it's been for decades now, and there is no realistic solution in sight, only keeps getting worse. Hence the calls for some middle ground.

apple just posted data showing phone location activity in the context of "shelter in place" breaking up.

google maps shows me live traffic based on phone locations.

IE the war on "personal privacy" has already been lost.

I installed the Australian govt covid tracing app this weekend, since the ability to trace and track new outbreaks is critical to easing lockdown.

Google and apple already know where my phone is. Might as well admit that and use it as a public health tool.

> the ability to trace and track new outbreaks is critical to easing lockdown.

Might work in some areas, but not in others.

For example, what does contact tracing mean in a dense area like downtown SF? Probably not workable, especially since the US is not organized for this kind of public health crisis.

I actually favor herd immunity for the US, since that's what we can actually accomplish before fall.

> IE the war on "personal privacy" has already been lost.

That's a separate issue. It's important to not conflate orthogonal concepts, or to make legal changes in reaction to a single crisis. Any privacy lost today will not be returned later.

Honestly I'm somewhat okay with companies collecting user data. They should just make it easy to opt-out of data collection and to delete all my data (i.e., "right to be forgotten").

And also not connect useful features to this opt out. For example Google Maps allows you to store locations only if you have location history enabled. I can't think of any reason for this besides an attempt to bully people into allow location history.

It seems plausible to me that it's just a consequence of some contingent aspect of the design of the location system, and there's not a compelling reason to refactor.

I think an important consideration about the I've got nothing to hide camp is that they don't need absolute privacy.

The argument about handing over passwords or writing letters on postcards falls flat because the person who's "losing" privacy can agree that a medium isn't private and respond according.

Not everyone needs 100% privacy all the time.

I've always felt that anyone who says "I don't care, I have nothing to hide," was committing to the position that privacy is not intrinsically valuable in itself, and thus should have no problem agreeing to install a webcam in front of their toilet.

Also, I think the set of people who proclaim that has a strong overlap with people who believe that transgender people going into the bathrooms of their choice is extremely alarming due to privacy concerns.

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