Basically, some expectation of privacy especially in a 1-on-1 conversation, even if it's via telecommunications tech rather than in-person.
Some people adopt a more filtered, cautious way of speaking anyway as a defense mechanism. For them it doesn't matter so much. Other people talk informally with less of a filter, and for them it matters quite a bit.
Given that recording is ubiquitous now anyway, and voice deepfakes are about to render even that irrelevant, there probably isn't a good argument against 1-party consent today.
(However, government officials, outside of a foreign policy context, deserve no privacy for anything related to their official duties. The argument that they need to be able to talk informally with their peers, without fear of public judgment, works against the public interest far more than it works for it. That helps build rapport, but no politician these days would fully trust someone they're just building rapport with; that kind of thing may be valuable for diplomatic relations and spies, but not for regular government officials. Privacy and secrecy among ordinary politicians is little more than a recipe for corruption and side-dealing that they know the public would be rightly upset about.)
Now, any conversation with 3 or more parties is considered public. A closed group chat on whatsapp has the same legal protection as shouting it on a megaphone to a crowd, meaning none whatsoever and people have already been convicted for their speech in closed chats or forums.
Are you actually asking hackernews, in a thread about banning encryption, why "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is not a good justification for being monitored without your consent?
Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate. You can't negotiate in earnest if every offer for compromise you put forward immediately results in (a) the losers of that compromise creating a ruckus and (b) your opponent using (a) to weaken you.
Public negotiations reward playing to the audience. (You see this in small groups–letting leaders or the people in a friend group who disagree pull aside almost always solves the problem better than litigating it as a group.) If every conversation might be recorded for replaying to a third party, then every conversation will be treated as an open one. That destroys room for compromise.
That may be. But corruption also festers in quiet safe places. It's not clear to me that the the tradeoff is worth it.
Public legislating, private bargaining [1]. This keeps substantive deliberation in the public domain while the horse trading, the job republics delegate to elected representatives, has a limited space within which it can efficiently engage.
It just isn't worth forcing every person to give up the ability to protect themselves by recording their everyday conversations just so that politicians can lie to the public and their donors while screwing over the people behind closed doors.
> Eventually the "losers" of a compromise are going to learn about how their elected officials voted
The point is to let both sides table ideas without having to face the downside. To propose what if scenarios to the other side.
[1] https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-gateway/apsa/assets...
Imagine if politicians acted like normal people, negotiating things in nuance instead of being showmen.
Speaking as someone who often has to tell people "Email that to me or I won't remember it", I can see the utility without it being intrusive.
1. Privacy. The cornerstone of personal conversation has always been an inherent right to privacy. Traditionally, conversations held in confidence were sacrosanct, and any disclosure of their content required mutual agreement. Otherwise, the second party can simply deny it and it will never be known with certainty what has been said.
2. Chilling effect on authenticity. In a climate where any conversation could be recorded without one's consent and later used against them, people would be compelled to adopt calculated diplomacy in all their interactions. This would sterilize authentic conversation, replacing genuine thoughts with measured communication, removing a lot of depth and meaning.
3. Weaponization of speech. Recordings under a one-party consent system could be misused in a myriad of damaging ways, from creating training data for voice (deepfake) AIs to insidious forms of blackmail. This extends beyond traditional notions of blackmail to include public shaming or character assassination. This is the "group chat has leaked" scenario, but potentially decades later. One could be a completely different (and potentially reformed) person, but their past will always haunt them and not let them get ahead in their public life, like hold an office or public trust.
4. Limited utility. In many places that allow first-party consent, these recordings are not recognized as valid evidence in court without consent from all parties involved. This significantly undermines their perceived utility as a defensive tool. Is it worth surrendering our privacy for this?
5. Accountability for human folly. People often vent and ramble, it's part of our emotional expression and a necessary component of our mental health. If every idle venting or thoughtless comment were recorded and held against us, it would make our lives much less peaceful. Sometimes it's good to let some thoughts die in a conversation. Reflect on your own past and the blunders of youth - good that they were not recorded, right? This also applies to intoxicated conversations, conversations while suffering from mental health illness, and similar.
6. Two-party consent already serves many purposes. For most business or evidence needs, two-party consent is enough. One can simply tell the other party that they will start recording the call if the other party does not hang up, and that will be implicit second-party consent in many countries. So one can record conversations, and one can choose to have only recorded conversations with some people. One-party consent has only marginal benefits over two-party, but it has significant downsides.
7. Little effect on harassment or threats. Threats and intimidation could be made in other ways, like face-to-face, or through coded language. "Your political campaign is going great, it sounds like a guaranteed win unless someone fabricates a scandal. You need to play it safe with the people that could."
8. Third-party recording. One-party consent doesn't mean a third party isn't recording. For example, smartphones could record audio of conversations for ad targeting and government purposes if there was one-party consent (one party turned on the call recorder).
9. Other contexts. If the laws for one-party consent are too permissive, this could lead to a lot of surveillance activities becoming permissible. For example, the definition of a conversation could be stretched to include all chatter on an office floor if just one person consents to the recording (perhaps a manager).
Where/when has the been true? Nowhere I know of.
> Chilling effect on authenticity, Accountability for human folly
There are lots of places with 1 party consent already. Not a problem
> Weaponization of speech
People who are going to commit crimes won't hesitate to commit other crimes. Irrelevant.
> Two-party consent already serves many purposes
For business 2 party consent is not enough. It would be enough if people didn't regularly commit crimes... but they do. Wage theft is probably the most common type of theft. Add on shenanigans with worker's comp, and other workplace nastiness and 1 party consent is very much needed.
> Little effect on harassment or threats
If one person can understand covert speech, other people can too. Irrelevant.
> Third-party recording
I'm a little sympathetic to accidental sharing of recordings, but there are plenty of ways to record that don't have this danger (dedicated recording devices and apps where the data doesn't leave the phone come to mind).
> Other contexts
Lots of things are possible. Your example isn't particularly compelling, though: not every instance of speech has an expectation of privacy.