Edward Snowden summarized it well.
"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."
What's interesting is he generally is aware of groups of people that should not do so, like those who are abused, but does not consider the possibility that everyone can become a target (through regime change for instance).
I suppose the most frustrating part is his example of employers turning down people for sharing too much on social media, which should be normalized, but someone not sharing on social media should be penalized for hiding. It's a tad concerning, especially as we're coming to terms with the real damaging effects of social media mentally.
This is exactly right. You can hold a view that is perfectly acceptable within mainstream society right now, and find that 10 years from now that view is considered extreme or dangerous. If you have a public and searchable history espousing that view, you could suffer very really consequences as a result, even if you no longer hold that particular view.
I think you would have a pretty hard time finding examples of this in somewhere like the US:
* Few things go from 'mainstream' to 'extreme' anywhere near that quickly.
* If something does make that transition, there would be hundreds of millions of people who previously held the view and millions of people who previously endorsed it publicly.
* People care about your current views, especially on topics where lots of people have changed their minds. In cases where I wrote about something and then later retracted it, I've never had anyone treat that as if I still hold my previous view.
On the contrary, you can have a live example in the US today, and you could have found another one six years ago.
"So if there was anything I was considering doing where if it became public I would be hurt, I wouldn't do it."
There is a great book Bonhoeffer[1] by Eric Mataxas which deals with this and a lot of other issues
> This corresponded almost exactly with things I shouldn't have been doing anyway, so it wasn't too hard.
The writer appears to be saying that there is no conflict between what he thinks is right and what the general public thinks is right. This is why I suggested naive or foolish might be better terms. I love Bonhoeffer, though!
Examples, explaining why I:
* Often let my kids do things alone at ages when other people wouldn't: https://www.jefftk.com/p/whats-the-alternative-to-independen...
* Disregard the warning on baby formula that says not to use the microwave: https://www.jefftk.com/p/stop-discouraging-microwave-formula...
* Work(ed) on ads: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads
The challenging thing about reading books like Bonhoffer is that it compels you to questioning what your response would have been if placed in the same situation.
I don't think we'll be able to prevent the disappearance of privacy as technology continues to get cheaper and more widespread. I'm not saying "this is good", I'm saying "this is coming, adapt".
It takes social courage, and more importantly courage of one's own convictions, to face the tide of conditioned and packaged social truths. "Truths" that will be repeated from friends, family, coworkers, such as "if you have nothing to hide .."
It is so much easier to go with the flow and takes not even a tiny bit of courage to do so.
Just disagreeing with the mainstream view on a topic often requires courage, trusting your reasoning and evidence over external sources. Then it typically requires additional courage to be public in your disagreement, especially in areas where it's common for people to criticize others for diverging from the mainstream view.
Still, I've found it really valuable to disagree publicly and then engage with the criticism, because that reduces the risk that my disagreement was due to a mistake.
It is difficult (but important) to self examine one's motive to insure it is not pleasure that is motivating one's standing in contradiction to (asserted) social pressures. And after that determination, it takes courage to be true to one's self.
Because this is often a standard emotional response to very large problems. It's one of the reasons so many people (mainly conservatives) downplayed the risks of COVID. It can be mentally easier to downplay or ignore a scary problem rather than acknowledge it.
Exactly. This is 100% cowardice. It's the mentally of a broken man who's too beaten to fight anymore. Very depressing.
To your broader point, you are correct. We do, and I'm guilty of it here, tend to use the specter of mental illness to silence or discredit people we disagree with.
Some things I've done that I think have a much better cost benefit trade off than fighting for increased privacy:
* Switching careers to work on pandemic mitigation: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
* Donating half my income for the last 10 years: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
* Advocating for cheaper housing: https://www.jefftk.com/news/housing
There are huge numbers of things that are wrong in the world: should I call someone a coward for not working on malaria prevention or pandemic mitigation? For living well while others suffer?
To reference the Snowden quote again, it would be like giving up your freedom of speech because it's too annoying to defend. That is cowardice.
My argument is not that I have nothing to hide. Instead, it's that hiding has enough chance of not working that none of us should rely on it.
I believe there should be due process and warrants before they can use data against you, and that people have a right to know how secure something is or isn't.
That doesn't mean I personally need to keep Google from knowing when I go to the store.
For example: personalizing pricing based on how much you’re likely to be willing to pay.
I’m flying to a tropical destination in a couple weeks, I live in a cold climate, and I just ordered a bunch of new warm weather clothes and some swim suits for my trip.
Any corporation with access to my email would know about my trip, my home address, any previous online clothing purchases, and how much I paid for given articles of clothing.
Using that, they can make a decent estimate of how elastic my demand is for the new clothes, and how much I’m willing to pay — especially if they leverage detailed financial information that’s readily available from data brokers.
How much would retailers by willing to pay for that kind of pricing insight?
How much would you overpay for goods and services thanks to that massive information asymmetry, in exchange for free e-mail hosting?
That’s not a far-fetched future; giving corporations, data brokers, and the government access to the most intricate inner-most details of your life hastens its arrival, and is dangerously and willfully naive.
I'll always be a fan of open source tech, and I 100% support right to privacy in private spaces. But we can't join every single protest in the world.
Five minutes delay fussing with buggy apps could mean missing a bus. Not having Google Services would probably mean I couldn't use important work apps. Not having location history could mean not being able to find something you dropped.
And not using Amazon prime would almost make some areas into prisons if you can't drive.
Warrants are easily acquired, and you will be charged based on a far lower standard of evidence than the state must meet to convict you.
While you can then avail yourself of due process, the deck is stacked against you — the cost to adequately defend yourself is astronomical.
You’re likely to take a plea deal to avoid the expense and risk of a trial; an enormous number of innocent people take plea deals or are wrongfully convicted every single day.
Better to keep the fox out of the hen house in the first place.
But you also have to look at the risk of getting fired because you missed an email if your self-hosted solution goes down, losing your wallet because you didn't have Tile tracking, extra risk of getting sick because you didn't get enough sleep while dealing with some last minute tech issue to make your more-private system work, getting lost because the open source app had worse data or compass calibration algorithms than Maps, getting money stolen because you used crypto that can't be reversed, etc.
The current suite of nonprivate tech offers an insane amount of power, especially for those of us without a good memory or navigational skills.
I guess it's the same issue with unions and protests, people who are one paycheck away from the streets won't risk a strike, because they'll lose everything by the time they get the benefits.
Do you think relying on these tools has made your memory better (allowing you to wean yourself off them), or worse (creating a customer for life)? I firmly believe it creates a sort of learned helplessness in people, in the same way the commercial internet in general is bad for ones memory or attention span.
Given how many people seem to believe Google Maps has gotten much more in-your-face (instead of doing its job and getting out of the way) over the last few years, but so few are willing to abandon it, I suspect I'm right: using the tools you find (and are!) so helpful creates a dependence on them.
Not that he cares, of course, but if it helps his bottom line, I figured "why not?"
He and Google (who are Good) will notice me any day now!
(posted from iPhone 6.9.3+d4e2a0b3ef at 37.986776, -76.187412 while drinking a refreshing Coke Zero and having my morning cigarette like you know i do everyday)
My time and safety are more valuable to me than my privacy, and I think everyone should consider their priorities.
If you want to use Tor and degoogle, I have no problem with that, I'm glad someone is studying that stuff in case it ever becomes truly necessary for people.
But not every person can join every protest. In terms of good done for the world compared to inconvenience to myself, I'm not convinced staying private is the most effective thing.
So enjoy the locally optimal time and safety you're able to get out of it, but please consider the global downsides of pushing the public perception in the wrong direction.
Come to think, the situation is rather similar to enjoying the conveniences of modern, energetically wasteful life without considering the climate problems this will cause for future you or future generations.
Many modern conveniences reduce resources use, because they replace real things with ones and zeros, and for better or worse many industries are getting forgotten.
I'm still hopeful the future will be a place where privacy is readily available but not strictly needed, but I can see why people would think otherwise.
> Many modern conveniences reduce resources use, because they replace real things with ones and zeros, and for better or worse many industries are getting forgotten.
I agree, I didn't mean to relate it to all aspects of modern life, just the energetically wasteful ones.
Although aside from the baseline things like refrigeration and plumbing, a lot of them aren't real conveniences, they're just traditions that evolved as displays of wealth. I wouldn't call nonnative lawns or large houses(Aside from maybe people with kids) or not being able to repeat an outfit within the same week or two convenient.
Some of them might be hedonistic in some way, but a lot of things that make pollution are pretty high effort.
Or does everyone share your priorities and beliefs, but those of us who act differently are just lazy, and so we construct justifications to defend our different actions?
For example when your therapist emails you from their Gmail account to set appointments, now Google knows you see a therapist. I never signed up to give that information to Google. Pay your bill your credit card, now Mastercard knows you see a therapist.
There needs to be some reasonable expectation of privacy written into law and a reasonable limit to how data can be captured and used.