‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ - Misunderstandings of Privacy [PDF 2008] | Hacker News Reader

‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ - Misunderstandings of Privacy [PDF 2008]

papers.ssrn.com

27 pointspanarky8 comments

I've always thought that the best response to "Privacy is less important because I've got nothing to hide" is what I call the "privacy lets you pick your nose" argument. There are plenty of things that we like to do in private, that are not illegal, but which, if revealed publicly, would cause substantial embarrassment. For example, picking your nose, watching porn, lip-syncing to cheesy music in the bathtub.

All of these things create individual pleasure, and thus overall societal utility and value. (That is, they make people happy.) To effectively deny people these individual pleasures by forcing them out into the open would be to reduce overall societal utility. Thus, privacy benefits society by enabling people to engage in legal, but potentially embarrassing, behavior.

(I happen to like Dan Solove's work a lot, and I think he is ultimately coming to the same conclusion as me, but his argument seems to rely on accepting his definition of privacy, while I think that the above argument simply attacks the "I've got nothing to hide" argument head on.)

I don't get that impression at all, after having read his essay (which I find very insightful indeed). What you're saying is only part of the reasons; privacy is not only about embarrassing things.

The people monitoring need to be accountable (that's what warrants are for)

- What does the process look like today?

- How long is data kept? (can we trust future use?)

We need to be able to control our information and trust those in which we confide

- If we expect companies not to give our information away, and they do, we'll loose trust in that company. It becomes a structural problem if we cannot trust any company.

- If that company gives the information away, we don't know how it is used any more.

There are probably a few more things that I missed, but from now on I'll have a much more open view on privacy.

You'd think that "the internet is forever" and "machine learning exists" would be sufficient to make people much more interested in safeguarding their privacy.

Agreed. It won't be long before Google can link up any writing you've done under your real name with all the things you thought you posted anonymously. A writer's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writeprint is hard to disguise without ruining the message.

Google Docs preview - http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdl.dropbox.co...

If you've got nothing to hide, maybe you need to get a life.

Many species in the animal kingdom camouflage themselves, so they won't be eaten by predators. I wonder if you could convince one of these animals to stop camouflaging themselves with an argument that the predators won't hurt you so long as you stop doing anything that might attract the predator.

When I first read your comment, I was thinking "Man, that ain't even the same thing."

But then it hit me that this is exactly the case socially. As Congressman Weiner is finding out, the predators will use what you reveal to feed on you.

We do need to feel free to take care of personal business without the overhead of always trying to guess what others will do with the info.

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