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

My pastor is a superhumanly wise person. Almost everything he has said has turned out to be true. Of the Patriot Act, he agreed that the government probably overreached, but he said these things are like a pendulum, and eventually it would swing back. On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going. The problem is that both sides of US politics are in on it, so I don't know what will ever correct this course. It seems that, eventually, we'll have Chinese-style, socially-scored citizenship, just run by corporations instead of the government.

https://www.cardcomplete.com/media/medialibrary/2021/03/AGBs...

Quoting from the text (section 5.5):

"The Cardholder must not disclose the assigned PIN, nor any personally chosen PIN (see Item 17.8.), nor the Secure Code to anyone, not even to employees of card complete. The Cardholder is responsible for ensuring strict secrecy concerning all card security details – PIN, Secure Code and mobileTANs received on his/her telephone (to be used for authenticating a ViS/MCID transaction and valid for a maximum of 5 minutes after receipt) – and must take all reasonable precautions to ensure that they cannot be discovered by others."

Thus, if you sign these conditions, you are obligated to keep this information secret. Similar obligations are imposed on customers for other cards and in other circumstances, in communication with banks, insurance companies etc. To keep these secrets, we need secure ways to store this information, and secure ways to communicate.

“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7308507-arguing-that-you-do...

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" - Cardinal Richelieu

Imagine terabytes of data?!

The "I've got nothing to hide" stance is often countered with stories how an individual may run into unexpected trouble for themselves.

But data aggregation has made sharing information a collective issue. And sharing information becomes a social requirement as we go along. This has consequences even for those who choose not to share private information easily (or who try to keep it limited).

It's worked a few times for me now (illustrating the point, not getting them naked).

Another one is "then why do you shut the curtains at night?" or "why do you lock your front door?" or "do you lock the bathroom door when you're at home with loved ones?"

But I feel those don't make as much of an impact and invite snarky responses more than the first one.

The Eternal Value of Privacy

https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/

Seems people in power throughout history have been wanting to pry into people's private lives. And 'regular' people feed that need themselves by watching "Reality TV" and following paparazzi type media outlets.

[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...

The alternative mental approach is a forced point of confrontation with imposing authorities, which terrifies the average person (depending on the country and its authorities, that may be a particularly rational reaction). Most people spend their entire lives avoiding confrontation whenever they can. They dread confrontations with a boss, co-workers, a spouse, friends, a waiter, a bully, a landlord, with nearly anybody. It causes immense anxiety for most people and they will seek to avoid it at great cost.

Now elevate it to the level of challenging the divine god-king powers of an omnipotent US federal government (a slight exaggeration) that throws around trillions of dollars like it's nothing, has a history of putting hundreds of thousands of people into prison unjustly in domestic 'wars' (war on drugs, war on crime, war on booze) and murders women and children by the thousands in pointless foreign wars with zero moral qualms (not an exaggeration). Now go challenge that beast head-on and proclaim loudly: you have no right to invade my privacy! Me, the little mouse down here (how the average person actually views their own existence), hear me roar! The average person is afraid of confrontation with their landlord, and they're going to do that mentally? They're going to challenge goliath? No, they're not. They're going to instantly shrink away as fast as they can. When they know there is something questionable about what the authorities are doing, and they fear that confrontation, the fastest way to mentally run away is: I have nothing to hide.

And that's all before we get to the entirely practical time limiting factors. The average person is also tired, maxed out on obligations (work, social, other), mentally stressed. That adds to their reasoning for avoiding conflicts, as conflicts can be expensive and risky. They don't like conflict to begin with, if you add in the pile of risk factors, it just makes it that much more desirable to avoid/evade if at all possible.

The only thing that's very interesting about the "I've got nothing to hide" approach, is how many people fail to grasp what the actual root of the issue is. It's fear of confrontation, not a misunderstanding, not vast ignorance. It can't be solved for, you're never going to convince the majority to be confrontational (they never have been), it will always be down to a small'ish minority of people to fight on their behalf (this is true whether we're talking about the Revolutionary War, WW2, civil wars, privacy, human rights in general, you name it).

The majority will always seek safety in numbers (think about it). I've got nothing to hide, is: I shall camouflage into the herd, nothing about me is particularly special, I don't stand out, I can avoid risky confrontation in this way (the highest % safety calculation for the majority is to hide in the herd; these calculations are made largely automatically, subconsciously, it's a biological function we do as animals), what are the odds they isolate on me (also the calculations for a typical person in Soviet Russia or any totalitarian system on a day to day basis, that's how such people get by and survive). It's an evolutionary survival tactic, it's not newly spawned due to the privacy debate, that's merely one application of it.

Alright, then.

TLDR: the author first steelmans the "nothing to hide" argument, we can present it as: "People who take part in illegal activities have no right for privacy of those activities. Intimate aspects of one's life are filtered by mindless automated algorithms, and are unlikely to be of interest to NSA; even if they happen to be, they will be processed by few government officials and unlikely to leak outside; regardless, it is a (statistically) small privacy sacrifice for a potential national security gain".

Then the author proceeds to explain what is privacy. It looks like he has spend a lot of time conceptualizing privacy and the subject of the paper is just an excuse to present his taxonomy of privacy. This motivation strongly hampers the argumentation in the book, which simply points out that as privacy is not just about "hiding the wrong", which is an incorrect premise of the "nothing to hide" argument. The author doesn't really tackle the "sacrifice" argument he himself brought up, other than arguing why privacy is more important than it might seem (and therefore the sacrifice is greater):

"Even surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them." - no source for the claim, there is a source however to the statement that it would be hard to prove:

"The nothing to hide argument focuses primarily on the information collection problems associated with the NSA programs. It contends that limited surveillance of lawful activity will not chill behavior sufficiently to outweigh the security benefits. One can certainly quarrel with this argument, but one of the difficulties with chilling effects is that it is often very hard to demonstrate concrete evidence of deterred behavior." [Daniel J. Solove, The First Amendment as Criminal Procedure, 82 N.Y.U. L. R EV . 112, 154–59 (2007).]

Another counterargument is that even if you think whatever information there about you can be known by government without harm to you, through aggregation and cross-analisys, new information about you can be evaluated, which you wouldn't want to be known to the government. Also, amassing knowledge about citizens gives government power and therefore creates disbalance between the power of government and its citizens.

So the only way the "sacrifice" argument is countered in the book is to put some light on how the sacrifice is actually quite bigger than it might seem - which doesn't require philosophical approach to privacy, just listing various negative effects of (mass) surveilance.

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Fragments I found interesting:

The argument is not only of recent vintage. For example, one of the characters in Henry James’s 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: “[I]f these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing.”

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Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared, “Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.” 29 Likewise, in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. “‘An altogether minor matter,’ the prosecutor replied . . . . ‘A crime can always be found.’”

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As one comment to my blog post noted: “If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?” Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues: There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes’ questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters.

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As one commenter aptly notes: By saying “I have nothing to hide,” you are saying that it’s OK for the government to infringe on the rights of potentially millions of your fellow Americans, possibly ruining their lives in the process. To me, the “I have nothing to hide” argument basically equates to “I don’t care what happens, so long as it doesn’t happen to me.”

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[Stronger forms of the argument are presented, like:] Privacy involves a person’s “right to conceal discreditable facts about himself.”[...]Posner asserts that the law should not protect people in concealing discreditable information. “The economist,” he argues, “sees a parallel to the efforts of sellers to conceal defects in their products.”

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In a less extreme form, the nothing to hide argument does not refer to all personal information, but only to that subset of personal information that is likely to be involved in government surveillance.[...] Information about what phone numbers people dial and even what they say in many conversations is often not likely to be embarrassing or discreditable to a law-abiding citizen. Retorts to the nothing to hide argument about exposing people’s naked bodies to the world or revealing their deepest secrets to their friends are only relevant if there is a likelihood that such programs will actually result in these kinds of disclosures. This type of information is not likely to be captured in the government surveillance. Even if it were, many people might rationally assume that the information will be exposed only to a few law enforcement officials, and perhaps not even seen by human eyes. Computers might store the data and analyze it for patterns, but no person might have any contact with the data.

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The taxonomy I developed is as follows: Information Collection Surveillance Interrogation Information Processing Aggregation Identification Insecurity Secondary Use Exclusion Information Dissemination Breach of Confidentiality Disclosure Exposure Increased Accessibility Blackmail Appropriation Distortion Invasion Intrusion Decisional Interference

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Under current Supreme Court Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, when the government gathers data from third parties, there is no Fourth Amendment protection because people lack a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in information exposed to others. 76 In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court concluded that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in bank records because “[a]ll of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.” 77 In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that people lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they “know that they must convey numerical information to the phone company,” and therefore they cannot “harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret.”

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Most privacy problems lack dead bodies. Of course, there are exceptional cases such as the murders of Rebecca Shaeffer and Amy Boyer. Rebecca Shaeffer was an actress killed when a stalker obtained her address from a Department of Motor Vehicles record.