Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”
write.privacytools.io
write.privacytools.io
SC's take (paraphrasingly, of course) is that without privacy, you're only rewarded for astroturfing your life & feigning a blandly successful life without pot holes.
The Social Dilemma (Netflix docudrama)'s take on it -- that facebook-et-al don't sell "your data" they sell "a guaranteed change in your behavior" -- is also a pretty damn powerful message.
This website's "nobody cares but they shouuuuuld!" baseline argument is not very effective, IMHO. These guys have the right idea -- giving access to privacy tooling -- but this post should've been more focused on education from the get-go. e.g. "We know you feel powerless about privacy. That's why we built [x resource]. Claw control back."
Why would someone take steps to empower themselves if they see no need for such power?
The current article argues in its opening that "nobody cares" ... The immediate retort to any "nobody cares" statement -- before one even finishes the sentence -- is "then it's probably for a good reason." It's counter-productive and frames your argument from the "weak outsider" perspective.
So if we ought to frame our argument from a position of competence rather than insecurity (my original point) and assuming people care is incorrect (your point), what ought we say to help people protect themselves?
I don't think I'm changing many minds, but I do try to offer a view most will never encounter themselves.
"Advertisers will be able to select you based on your history"... For what? For showing you an ad for the cool pants company that produces just the kind of pants you've always wanted? For an awesome, in-depth coding course? I'd rather get relevant ads than generic crap that I don't care about, even if it makes me spend more money.
I agree this won't convince people for the reason you've stated I just want to make sure we're all on the same page about the actual level of harm that happens.
I mentioned this earlier, but IMHO the best answer is one taken from Netflix's Social Dilemma:
"Facebook makes money by selling a guaranteed change behavior. Your behavior."
Tell them they should do it for their kids and they will comply. It is also the truth that when people give away control, that they also implicitly do it for their successors.
Windows or Apple ecosystems aren't good for building tech literacy, which will still be important in the foreseeable future.
May be if every person got an email every time their data is sold to the third party, things would have changed quickly.
There is no option to request my info be deleted, or even to correct the info so people aren't harassing the wrong person (some of the information wasn't right, they are selling my parents and families addresses instead of mine). They ALSO have a free app that allows up to 5 contact a day, so they might even be giving this info out for free and I'm assuming someone is harvesting as much free data as they can.
It's absurd that there is an entire industry based on selling private info that they themselves acquired from other companies. It's disgusting that people have built an industry on buying and selling private information
I ended up moving as much data as It's disgusting that people have built an industry on buying and selling private informationI could to a private server, but this really isn't the solution. Most people don't have IT backgrounds to be able to do this sort of thing. I hope more people become aware and sIt's disgusting that people have built an industry on buying and selling private informationtart pressuring govt. officials to change laws.
Edit: formatting
Try telling someone, even a close friend, that you saw them doing something, while they did not expect to be seen by anyone.
I will give you $5 if they are not in the slightest bit annoyed by that.
It became clear to me that "I have nothing to hide" was actually "I don't think I can fight it." It was a justification for an apathetic view. Which I understand. If you try to fight a team of psychologists, mathematicians, and super computers, it seems like you have no chance. I think this same thing goes well beyond just privacy too. But most people need to consider that most people are not tech literate and it is a very daunting idea for them, one that they are pretty embarrassed about.
Meanwhile many schools are rolling out Chromebooks and are happy about it.
If school administration were to save money using subsidized Chromebooks, they could save even more money by stubbornly remaining in the paper age. Teachers would be happier too, and students would at the very least be not worse off; I am even willing to say that they would be forced to learn analog skills that are desperately needed nowadays.
In short, I do not buy that it is lack of options that force schools to buy those products. It is the evil wizardry called "Marketing" that bewitch school administrators and prevent them to see the options in front of their noses.
If you don't like the idea of someone maintaining a "digital reputation" based on your activity on platform X, don't use platform X. It's that simple.
Also: "We should compare this problem to Global Warming." Similarities? Social cooling is subtle and complex, just like global warming! Such insight.
1) Where were you last night?
2) How much money is in your bank account? Do you have any debt?
3) What is your Debit Card PIN/account password/...
4) What is your address? Your families address?
5) Can I see your key?
And so on. Everybody needs to proctect themselves and potentially others attached to them. There is a good reason for these questions being awkward and inappropriate.
"If I have done nothing wrong, then no one has the need to take an interest in my personal affairs."
But we don't know that you have done nothing wrong. Why don't we just take a quick peek and we'll leave you alone until we randomly decide to do this pointless exercise again?
If someone is arguing for dragnet surveillance with the idea that it only really impacts the guilty, and you respond by pointing out that you're innocent so there's nothing to gain by surveilling you, you haven't refuted their position at all.
edit I see we're retreading an exchange (between others) from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23709602
And I would assume most people have things they would rather other people or government not know about.
Everyone has secrets they want to keep.
6) Let the toilets door open, after all we all know what you're going to do there.
The govermnent is not some sort of abstract infallible entity. It consists of regular people. And giving those people deep access to your private and personal life is going to be abused more than it will help.
Have we already forgotten what disastrous consequences moving toward such a totalitarian government has? Have we already forgotten about the horrors of the second world war and its aftermath?
> The govermnent is not some sort of abstract infallible entity.
Most people agree it's not infallible, but a lot of people view it as an abstract entity and not just a group of different people.
That is not a persuasive argument to anyone who understands that people working for governments/justice systems are much more keen to be bound by... laws... than randos on the Internet.
> Giving those people deep access to your private and personal life is going to be abused more than it will help.
Yeah, I'll need a pretty convincing citation about that because it sounds like a load of misinformed nonsense to me. At the very least, you ought to segment your argument based on regional zones. As an example, in the EU governments do collect quite a lot of deep information on their citizens (their finance, their health, their skillsets, etc). They can then use that information to give out unemployment insurance, support education, tackle the best part of healthcare costs and so many other things that have a truly positive effect on people.
> Have we already forgotten what disastrous consequences moving toward such a totalitarian government has? Have we already forgotten about the horrors of the second world war and its aftermath?
Wait, is your argument that citizens in the US, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, etc. will experience a shift of their government to totalitarian states in their lifetime? If so what are you basing this belief on?
But it really is probably the case that most people making general statements to the effect of "I've got nothing to hide" don't actually believe what they are saying, or they haven't fully worked out the implications.
That being said I'm a very private person and I wouldn't want to give out any data, but just playing a devil's advocate here.
However a grey line starts to emerge when companies use the argument “tracking to make better recommendations and improve your life in general”. This may be innocuous on the company’s part, eg “we just want to make a better recommendation out of the hundreds, maybe thousands or millions of products we have”. And yes it may improve my life in so far as consumer satisfaction is able to momentarily or even permanently do so.
However there is a weight of responsibility here, which other comments also refer to, and this that in totality the privacy cost may actually be so invasive and so easy to aggregate in the wrong hands, and so difficult for individuals to have control of, that “make better recommendations and improve [consumer] life in general” becomes hard to justify.
Some portions of information seem innocent too like 'how much is in your account' could mean the difference between if someone tries to target me or not. Say I owe 500 bucks and have 10 in the bank and they may not bother. But say something like I have no debt and have a million in the bank and suddenly I am a very attractive target. That is for both 'good' and 'bad' actors.
Something as simple as giving your email to someone can tie you into yet another ad network. Which has already profiled you.
What is the worst of it is, I really do not care if you had the information. I do care if you use my information to mess up my life or harass me endlessly. So my default position is 'sorry I am not telling you that'.
We've got to find a better set of arguments that we can use to convince people. I'm very strongly into privacy rights and I'm not convinced by this argument. Why would someone who doesn't care be convinced?
- You close the door of the toilets. You do have something to hide (we all know what you're doing. you're hiding anyway)
"I don't need privacy because my actions are questionable, but because your judgment is" (think dictatures, wrong guys at the top of the decision pyramid, 2nd world war ..)
If we're entering a valid contract under the justice system of our country of residency, why not? Similar services already abound, in particular around people who contract to visit and attend to older citizens.
Then again I'm asking as a European citizen living in a country with a comprehensive legal system, a functioning police force, cheap insurance policies, so on so forth. Certainly that ecosystem plays a role in our inner fears.
... Oh. And BTW. I'll be making some copies of your keys to give to a bunch of others interested in placing adds on your coffee table (or so they claim). I'll also go through all your drawers to see if I can't find any other keys/access cards/... to gain access to your office or your colleages' offices, friends' or family's homes, etc. just so I can provide them with the same adds "service" as I intend to provide you. Of course I don't remind you of any of this. Nor do I tell your colleagues, friends, family, etc. After all. What you don't know will aid me and what they don't know will aid me. ;-)
im not going to get into any of the better arguments right now but one thing i like to ask when people say they have nothing to hide is "what kind of things are people looking for?"
I think its good to get a handle on what the person knows first before you start throwing out counter arguments. in a lot of cases people don't even know whether they have something to hide or not and are just repeating what they have heard others saying
Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems..
we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
Did you know that law enforcement and justice can request and will try to gain access to data you share with any company?
"Oh, but I have done nothing wrong."
The definition of "nothing wrong" isn't set in stone. It's always up for interpretation. You might feel you're doing nothing wrong, but that doesn't mean authorities will always see it that way.
Remember, in some countries, authorities use your social media to monitor against tax fraud. [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/11/11/tax...
There's always that probability of a change of political or judicial direction towards more invasive measures in your personal life using the data you share with third parties. You can't predict with certainty that in 10 years time you won't be earmarked as a "subversive element" as a result of mass data mining of the same data you happily share on line. Never assume "it won't happen to me."
They ultimately just "trust the government" to do the "right thing" no matter how flawed that thinking is. This is partially the fault of the education system and them not "knowing their history" that well.
It's only when such abuses of privacy happen to them personally that they become ultra-privacy activists. We've seen this even with politicians that fought to expand mass surveillance powers and then did an 180 when they saw those powers were used against them, too (who would've thought?!).
Therefore, it doesn't make a great deal of sense to make all sorts of trade-offs in the name of privacy. There's not much to gain.
If you've been specifically targeted by a state actor, you're going to have a much harder time than if your goal is to resist general dragnet surveillance.
> There's not much to gain.
This ignores whether you've been specifically targeted.
So, now you're gambling with whether or not the spotty evidence is spotty enough to make you look innocent or guilty. Therefore, everyone has something to hide because the whole truth will not always be evident and some partial truths can make you look guilty (ex. your cell phone location was very close to a murder scene. You didn't kill anyone, you walked by the spot a few minutes before it happened).
There are great reasons we maintain privacy in our society's current configuration. A shift can sound like a perfect tool for authoritarians and many stories suggest that result but it might also be a perfect tool for exposing them early and suppressing their rise while facilitating greater safety and efficiency in society. We will certainly have to adjust our societal agreements and expectations.
I think that a society that is too scared to break every little law or regulation even when it doesn't make sense would eventually tend to becoming conformist -and a stagnant, conformist society is worse than one with the rate of serious crimes that the traditional methods of enforcement leave.
It's better to show that they already take steps to be private rather than asking privacy-invasive questions. One of those makes you the bad guy, the other shows that they actually do value privacy.
Which is just to say: a lot of privacy talk is mere question-begging. It's assumed we all feel the same privacy-based emotions (and pro-privacy arguments like yours attempt to appeal to those emotions), but I find that I rarely share my interlocutor's intuitions on this topic, so your argument is still ahead of you.
And further, as a rule of thumb if someone is dealing in hypotheticals it means they don't have actual proof of harm. You'd never make an argument like this if you could point to Bob Jones and say "X happened to Bob Jones and it could happen to you."
I think you can absolutely use an intensive action to show that lesser ones are objectionable.
"If privacy is not important in itself, why are you covering your body with underwear and pants? Why don't you put cameras throughout your house, including your bedroom?"
Clearly our actions reveal that we DO think privacy is important in itself. What "I have nothing to hide" really means is "I have not yet been personally affected, so I don't care." It's apathy, not a value statement.
There's no point in arguing with some people. The logic just doesn't work.
people are ok with giving away some of their privacy because they believe that companies and governments are trustworthy and that they will not abuse it.
asking them to give you their password isn't the same thing. you are not an "official" person that is bound by any company rules or laws and you could easily spend the rest of the day/week/month going through their emails wreaking havoc if you really wanted to. if a government official or police officer had access to their credit card number there is much less of a chance of them abusing it compared to someone they know or some stranger in the street.
even people that are aware of their data being collected probably know that there isnt someone in a van or an office cubical reading through every email they send/receive. its all just bulk collection and someone only looks at it if you get flagged for some reason.
The issue is that corporations, like Facebook, have some very sweet "desserts" to entice people to abrogate their privacy. Alternatives have always given great privacy (spinach), but little in the way of a replacement for the "candies" that Facebook offers.
Facebook is incredibly valuable, and can afford to hire vast armies of engineers and psychologists, all dedicated to getting their "product" (that's users) to make themselves more "productive." Think farmers, giving hogs higher-protein, better-tasting food.
Until alternatives can provide a better "dessert" experience, and only offer spinach, then the vast majority of users won't come to them.
For example if you're gay you might not want everyone to find out. Or if you're into some weird kinky stuff. Or even better if you live with a hidden identity because you've witnessed against organized crime.
It's fine to give away your personal privacy, but it's harder to throw other people under the buss (if you're capable of empathy as most of us are).
People are generally not willing to endure even the slightest inconvenience for the sake of a philosophical concept like privacy. I've seen people make big changes in response to widespread negative outcomes (ie, coronavirus), but I couldn't imagine a similar response to an intangible issue like potential privacy violations.
Whether or not you believe you have nothing to hide is immaterial, too; there are some people in the world who might disagree with you (for religious, political, or moral causes) and they could potentially be very interested in your data. Do you think the people who worked at the world trade center felt they had anything to hide? how about the folks at the Olympics in Munich? Hell, I bet the people we (US) drone strike don't feel like they have anything to hide; after all, they're the good guys, and those invading Americans are the aggressors.
This is far more complex than "I'm not valuable". Perhaps, philosophically, if you lived a perfectly saintly life and never made any enemies or had an opinion that upset anybody ever, you could say you had nothing to hide.
I have never heard anyone say this though it's a common internet strawman. Certainly there are people who don't care much about their browser cookies or the information they share on Facebook, but it doesn't mean they have 'nothing to hide'. They just disagree on what they need to keep private.
I can't say I worry about cookies at work where I'm only browsing tech sites.
If you don't mind a heavy-going read, I recommend these papers by Solove: 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [0], Conceptualizing Privacy [1], A Taxonomy of Privacy [2].
See also this HackerNews discussion on the nothing to hide argument from a few months back. [3]
[0] https://ssrn.com/abstract=998565
[1] https://ssrn.com/abstract=313103
Also, as the author, I whole-heartedly recommend reading the aformentioned papers.
[1] https://lobste.rs/s/mrlfwh/why_privacy_matters_even_if_you_h...
[0] https://write.privacytools.io/privacy-simplified/why-privacy...
https://web.archive.org/web/20191224125253/https://write.pri...
> Why would you not care about one of your human rights?
That's essentially an appeal to authority or appeal to the majority argument. You haven't shown why I should care about privacy, you've only stated that the current consensus is that privacy counts as what we call a human right.
> it's not that I have nothing to hide, I simply don't have anything I would like to share, especially unknowingly.
Not really. I have plenty to hide, but that doesn't mean I've done anything wrong. I wouldn't agree to a camera in the bathroom, despite that I don't use the room to commit crimes. It's not that I merely don't care to have a camera, I would consider it a violation for there to be one.
> 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.
I probably should have used it in this article....
It turned out that when people are trying to cast doubt on you, frame you, or otherwise are in a fight with you, knowledge IS power.
There's a misconception that you need to do something wrong to be punished:
* In a civil suit, a judge determines who is more likely to be right, and that can be based on gut feelings, circumstantial evidence, or fabricated stuff.
* Criminal law suits have a higher bar, but at the end of the day, the policeman and prosecutor get evaluated based on whether they threw someone in jail, not whether they threw the right person in jail. To do that, they need to convince a jury.
* Even if you're not throw in jail, a 2-year criminal investigation which costs you $200k in legal fees and eats up all of your mental cycles can leave you financially and emotionally debilitated. All that takes is some government employee having enough to be convinced there's something worth investigating.
* Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion. Our legal code is long enough we ALL break laws we don't know about. If a prosecutor or policeman believe you deserve to be in prison, they'll work really hard to do that.
An email where you misphrase yourself, a record of where you were on some date, or otherwise can all come back to haunt you, even when you've done nothing wrong. It's better to keep that stuff private.
Disclaimer: I've never personally been through a criminal investigation or prosecution. I've been through a couple civil cases. I was threatened with a criminal prosecution once unless I ceded ground in a business transaction. I didn't do what the other party threatened to accuse me of (and they knew it), but:
1. Evidence was enough messy evidence that I think they could have gotten a criminal investigation going.
2. Threatening criminal prosecution as leverage is extortion. I didn't know how far the other party would go. Would they fabricate evidence?
I spoke to a very good lawyer. Their opinion was that this would never make it to court -- even with if the other party faked evidence -- but that the time and cost of handling a criminal investigation would far outweigh any upsides. They advised me to fold. I folded. In retrospect, I'm glad I did.
Why do we like to defecate in privacy? What is the evolutionary reason? Animals do this too. Dogs only get to business when you give them some privacy and they like to get in the bushes if they can. I would assume it's an instinctive drive to get away from the community, to go somewhere with little social activity, so we don't make our living spaces dirty and infectious with our feces.
I don't think this is the same kind of thing as trying to keep one's political opinions or salary private.
You probably misspelt "Animals", but "niemals" is German for "never" or "no way". Gave me a chuckle in context.
On topic: there's probably more to it in humans, because animals don't have cultural phenomena like shame about their sexual organs, making embarrassing noises or smelling bad.
I would say the parallel with defecating in private is valid, as it can lead to the same perceived loss of social status as "not earning enough" or "having an unacceptable opinion".
Not only that, but the community isn't better served by someone shitting in public. You can make the argument that if everyone's salary was public information the community as a whole would be better off. Yet we still have people at all points on the income spectrum hiding their salary for various reasons.
* I might be picking a big booger with my pointer finger.
* I might be cleaning my butt in ways which are offensive in your culture, whether using my right hand in the India, without TP in the US, or in a hundred other ways.
* I might be managing a really nasty fungal growth somewhere you can't see.
* I might be pleasing myself.
* I might not be washing my hands after I pee.
* I might be inspecting a polyp for cancer.
* I might be writing "For a good time, call" graffiti, leaving the phone number of your mother/sister/daughter/wife.
* I might be dealing with my period.
... and so on.
But jokes aside, the quote is direct anti-symbolism to the "But I have nothing to hide" and found it pretty effective, even in its silly nature, when arguing with people who are too eager to give up all privacy.
1. You did something wrong.
2. Someone else wants to do something wrong to you.
The first is in your control. I think I've acted with sufficient integrity for my life that I have nothing to hide which might land me in trouble.
The second is out of your control. There are unreasonable people in this world. If you have a stalker, you don't want them to know where you are. If your spouse cheats on you and leaves you, you might have a custody battle on the line. If your government goes the way of Germany or Russia circa 1940, you might want to hide your ethnicity or political beliefs. A police officer is investigating a crime, when someone you didn't like was killed; you didn't do it, but time, place, and motive are all there. None of these are particularly likely, but they do come up.
I have one person in my life, and to protect myself from them, I have a limited online presence. I use fake names, and my LinkedIn stopped updating a few years back which limits career prospects, but it's a sacrifice worth making. I let out a lot of information before that, which was a mistake. I went through some legal disagreements at one point, where another party acted unethically and decided to extort me. These things aren't in your control.
When I was young, I had nothing to hide. When I was older, I learned information is power, and information asymmetry can help you or hurt you. With that wisdom, I now have a lot to hide, and I advise younger folks to be mindful of their privacy.
I intentionally listed a lot of different things in my post, with fault lying in different places or nowhere at all, to give an idea of the variety of reasons one might want to hide something.
I did street photography for a while and a lot of it was about approaching people nicely and asking, or surreptitiously taking photos. I try to observe photography laws and made sure any photos of private buildings were taken from a public street, although I did get asked by the security guard at a mall to please move to the public sidewalk one time when I walked onto a parking lot to get the shot I wanted.
As I understand the laws in California at the time, photos taken from public property do not need releases from the property owners nor from people unless you intend to use the photos commercially, although I did not explicitly research the laws myself.
The same thing can happen to anyone of us if our private life is looked with the eyes of another person.
Steven Rambam would probably disagree. He's a private investigator who's given many excellent talks on privacy at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js&t=10m20s
He goes into exquisite detail on the ways in which private info is shared, sold, amalgamated, and analyzed by private and public entities, and how law enforcement uses (and abuses) these resources. That particular talk is from 2016, so things are probably even worse now.
Security experts spent 2 decades arguing for privacy. Very little has changed. For most people, privacy is not an end in itself.
What were you hoping for, exactly?
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif...
https://letsencrypt.org/stats/#percent-pageloads
https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?e...
We assume that we keep progressing and not stepping back into our dark past. But is that realistic?
The person you are today might be respected and legal (in the sense of a country's law or society). But within the next 5 years, there could be a different kind of government, one that gradually reverses your rights. And suddenly the facts about you (each one of them already collected today through your browsing habits or followings/followers interests) can expose you, your family or friends, and even worse they could put you or them in danger.
The only reason i may care about privacy is because the information can be used to hurt me.
What need to be solved is the issue of "information used to harm" instead of hiding the information(privacy)
What is the real issue of want to lock my bathroom door? Because someone could hurt me while I take a shit, but if that issue can be prevented, I wouldn't need bathroom door to be locked.
I don't close the door when I use the restroom because I fear physical harm. I just don't want someone walking in while I'm using the commode.
Door is not the only way to solve this issue.
The question can be asked, why would someone walk in if they can see you using the commode ?
so then why ? maybe because of shame. So then its the shame that need to be fixed.
Then it is equally valid for some other people to say privacy doesn't matter because 'none of yours or anyone else's damned business'.
If you trying to convince other why privacy matters, thats not going to be helpful.
> If you trying to convince other why privacy matters, thats not going to be helpful.
I'm not trying to. I'm pointing out that I, nor anyone else, has to. You aren't entitled to know why one wants privacy.
No I don't fucking like you looking up shit about me that I didn't explicitly mean to share, and I don't owe you an explanation.
I think, most people have something to hide but they think they could hide it even if the circumstances getting harder.
If things are hard to hide and you can still manage to hide them, you will be questioned even less. Because who would go through all that trouble?
I think that is the wrong attitude. Create friction by whatever means fit with your life style and work flow.
I do simple things like delete all cookies in all of my devices at least once a week, use the Duck Duck Go browser on iOS and iPadOS (I only use laptops for coding so I just use Safari and Firefox on my Mac and Linux laptops), disable location tracking as much as possible, and I use ProtonMail and Proton Calendar.
As someone once said, if you have nothing to hide, then you don’t have a life.
Personally, I believe that surveillance capitalism, with creeping neoliberalism and neoconservativism pose an existential threat to any semblance of democracy. Maybe democracy is a lost cause? I don’t believe it, and I am willing to put up some fight to at least try to preserve it.
This is what I kept hearing from many people repeatedly. And I did a little experiment.
I bought an aged twitter account just to tweet a thread about privacy and see whether people care! )before iOS 14 was released) And I got 55,000 total engagements!
Some loggers are even selling (blogs with paywall) steps to turn off privacy settings!
One thing that has always irked me is the carelessness by which a man may give out, and is expected to give out, his full name.
Almost everyone has accepted that this is a bad idea on the internet, but in corporal social interaction full names are given out as if they be blowjobs, and so much information can be uncovered from a man's name.
It needs some serious revisiting and consideration how this works and I think in today's modern æra we probably need to do away with a single unified name for all purposes and allow citizens to operate under pseudonyms depending on the setting, at a minimum to keep one's professional and social life more separate.
Another issue is visible faces in public. My jurisidiction on the eve of the corona pandemic actually passed a lot to ban full-face covering, worded neutrally, but everyone knew it was about certain Islāmic garments. Supposedly it was necessary that every citizen's face be publicly recognizable, yet now we all cover it with masks to no problem whatsoever.
Even without a pandemic, a man should have the right to obscure his face in public and be unrecognizable for whatever reason he might desire.
I have nothing against giving my name to in-person acquaintances, simply because they don't have access to the right resources to dig under the surface of my public image. If they do have access to such resources, I trust them anyway to not pry too hard.
My master's thesis and place of employ can freely be retrieved from my name and there is nothing I can do to hide this.
I am not a proponent of "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" (quite the opposite, in fact), but disclosure of your information under academic and professional context is not only unavoidable, but actually beneficial. As long as the information is reported honestly, it serves as a public record of your positive reputation. This allows all the participants of the job ecosystem to make better decisions about hiring/accepting job offers, because it reduces the risk of the unknown. It's to be embraced, not avoided.
So pretty much the “I have nothing to hide”-argument?
There is nothing “professionally inappropriate”; I simply do not want arbitrary persons to be able to look up where I work or what my master's thesis was about and many other things.
What if I ever were to find myself having a stalker who can now easily look up my place of employ to accost me there? What if others realize what my field of expertise is due to reading my master's thesis and use that to nag me for assistance?
> I am not a proponent of "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" (quite the opposite, in fact), but disclosure of your information under academic and professional context is not only unavoidable, but actually beneficial. As long as the information is reported honestly, it serves as a public record of your positive reputation. This allows all the participants of the job ecosystem to make better decisions about hiring/accepting job offers, because it reduces the risk of the unknown. It's to be embraced, not avoided.
And I could surrender my master's thesis voluntarily if I were to go job hunting to my benefit.
But in my jurisdiction looking up the name online of potential employees is already not allowed, though obviously it can never really be stopped, they can't reference what they find in there without opening themselves.
You say you are not a proponent, but this is absolutely a case of “I have nothing to hide.”; you decide what information is beneficial or not. Even if it be positive information to you, it might not be to others.