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Comment by cortic | Hacker News Reader

Posted this two years and five months ago, but its still relevant: My nothing to hide argument;

Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? surely 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 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.

edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many someones.

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Perfect rebuttal, imo. Everyone has something to hide. It doesn’t mean you’re actively committing crimes… those who say they don’t care the NSA are reading everything they write lack imagination, imo.

I have even more trivial examples: love letters, nude photos, political articles you don't intend to publish, medical records, attempts at poetry, porn collection, business plans, drawings etc

Plenty to hide from basically everyone.

Thanks for posting this, cortic. I hope you don't mind that I've published your argument here: https://www.privacytools.io/

I don't mind, help yourself.

I would turn this argument around on itself and say, yes, of course I have things to hide, but none of those things need to hidden from 1) authorities conducting legitimate searches; 2) mass surveillance programs that are looking for terrorists; 3) advertising trackers; 4) and so on.

You're absolutely right that who and what matter here, but I find the typical who and the typical what to be entirely unobjectionable.

It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments. Of course it's easy to think of hypothetical policies to which I'd object; the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.

The only way to get me to agree that a policy is odious is for you to make up some hypothetical policy that doesn't exist and say, "but what if that happened?!!" And I just don't find that very compelling.

In summary, you're absolutely right that, "nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence." The complete sentence is this: I have nothing to hide from any of the people currently looking in any of the places they're looking.

>It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments

Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business!

>the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.

You may not care, but I do care, and lots of other people do too. My right to privacy is inherently linked to my dignity as a human being and the neither the government, or anyone else, has the right to violate my human dignity no matter how important they think it is or how inconsequential the details of what I want to keep private are! If you have different ideas about human dignity and privacy, and you want to share all of the intimate details of your life to every government and corporate entity on the planet, more power to you. Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Some of us do have a problem with that, solely for the (completely valid) reason that we value our privacy and what we do in our bathrooms is not the government's business, or facebook's business, or the business of anyone else, no matter how vehemently they claim they need to peer into our bathrooms for "national security" reasons or to target us with ads. The same goes for the rest of our lives.

> Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!).

Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that.

Again, if things were different, then they'd be different, and I'd have different opinions. But things aren't different. Things are as they are.

Just more evidence that every privacy argument starts with, "but what if..."

>Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that.

You fail to understand that people who value privacy and human dignity view the NSA tapping our phones exactly the same as we view people watching us in the bathroom. There is no "what if.." - this is happening now. Our privacy and human dignity are currently being violated in a wide variety of ways.

I understand it; it's just that it's an eccentric and unpopular worldview, so often asserted as though it's obvious and universally held. It's not obvious and it's not universally held. The burden is entirely on the privacy people to make their case.

>eccentric and unpopular worldview

The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia. I'm not suggesting that the right to privacy and human dignity are popular or universally held beliefs, I'm stating that the assault on privacy and human dignity is occurring right now, in contradiction to your assertion that this assault only occurs as some sort of hypothetical, slippery slope argument. We can agree to disagree over the worth of privacy and human dignity, but it is simply false to argue that the violation of privacy and human dignity is some sort of theoretical assertion about future possibilities, rather than an ongoing transgression.

> The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia.

Yes, and people died to get those rights, whereas the privacy advocates want to earn them by assertion. Just as it doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular, it also, you know, doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular.

It works both ways. You've got a big case to make and the burden is on you to make it.

I suppose my pointing out the obvious, isn't that obvious to people. But it strikes me as a crazy blind spot; Every serial killer, rapist, child abuser, blackmailer and swindler - had a job, in IT, in civil service, many more recently in the police force. We are bombarded with a steady stream of examples. How can people maintain a Disney princess belief in strangers, so long as they are employed?

currently being the key word there. can you guarantee you will feel this way for the life of your data? if suddenly you become concerned with those collecting the data what do you do with the historical profile they’ve built for you?

> 1) authorities conducting legitimate searches; 2) mass surveillance programs that are looking for terrorists;

Right. Who decides they're legitimate? And who the terrorists are?

Would you like the right to check your location history for church attendance, or the left to scan your messages for inappropriate thinking? That could be made legitimate with the right parliament :)

I think we actually have pretty widespread agreement about who the terrorists are. Again, this is a slippery-slope argument of the form, "but what if they start pursuing people we don't all agree are the terrorists?" And the answer to that is that if things were different I would have different opinions, obviously.

> that if things were different I would have different opinions, obviously.

Oh yeah; problem is, by the time things are noticeably different it takes a war, a revolution or at least fleeing across the border to fix them.

Identity theft and related fraud is a reality for quite a few people, if that counts as "not a slippery slope argument".

Right, and it's already a crime.

Yes, my point is that a lack of general privacy hygiene, both personally and businesses collecting your information, directly provides information for these crimes. It's very nearly the reason why hacking many companies with personal information is so valuable. It's already a crime, and it's already a (gigantic!) known vector feeding crimes.

Which seems like a pretty good argument for tightening down on privacy, rather than allowing it to continue as-is or worsen.

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