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Comment by gattr | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?

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The "I don't have anything to hide" argument usually misses that you can't know today what you should be hiding from the government tomorrow.

You have everything to hide by default and the onus is on every actor to prove why they need information and how it's isolated from other information.

Such as your genetic ancestry

Or if you are a trump follower or not.

The "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" people are cheering this on. They don't know or care about any of the things you just said.

Do you have cause to believe "nothing to hide" is a partisan position? I'd expect that half of such people are on the left and are critical by default of the new administration. Seems to be supported by the second chart here: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/how-american...

It’s a position held by extremists on both sides and the natural ally of extermists, the lazy.

I also find this a bit suspect- the more extreme you are, the more likely you are to have something to hide. The extreme left is well aware of the way communists and hippies were treated through the 20th century, while the extreme right has been subject to a lesser version in the 21st and are very skeptical of intelligence agencies. Moderates seem much more likely to trust institutions and accept the status quo.

I have no idea how to investigate this empirically, though.

I don't really think it correlates with political spectrum at all. Similar to how "hard on crime" has a pretty weak correlation woth partisanship. It really comes down to upbringing, influences, and education on how you perceive data privacy.

In real life, I hear people of all political stripes embracing positions between "nothing to hide" and "the govt can find out my personal info anyway, so why not email it directly to nameless scammers overseas?"

Online it works like most things. Everybody pretends it's a partisan food fight, even if they have to lie.

They will care when they personally get badly screwed.

They will not know that theyre screwed because media will tell them theyre doing great

Best angle with that crowd is that insurance companies are going to screw them over with all the data.

I'm not so sure there is complete overlap, there were plenty of pro national security democrats.

You can be pro national security and pro privacy.

I don't have anything to hide but I still close the door when I take a dump.

Good reminder of why people should be wary of governments collecting data because this a stark reminder that the government can change at any time.

For some people, it literally changes based on the administration. We need to teach people to always be skeptical of government overreach, no matter who is in office.

"I have nothing to hide" really misses the point of what privacy is for. I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy.

Also, blackmail isn't the only way to have personal or intimate information used against you. As the absolutely massive advertising industry can tell you, knowing more details about people makes them easier to influence and manipulate.

1. I don't want the federal government to know much about me.

2. I think the federal government executive branch should be able to control itself and inspect itself.

The "I have nothing to hide" perspective on privacy is immediately revealed as disingenuous when you ask them to place a web cam in their shower.

Privacy clearly is valuable for it's own sake.

i like to ask those people “fine, but do have shades on your windows? i mean if you have nothing to hide…”

I fear that only very bitter experience will convince those folks.

I actually thought the government had all this control already over all this.

This is an interesting side effect indeed. The people I know irl who have espoused this view are, ironically, the people who never liked Elon Musk in the first place. It'll be interesting to see how their narrative evolves now, if at all, as they stare at a practical example which contradicts them!

It's a bit of a straw man. I might get labelled as part of that group. But in reality, I have nothing to hide given a search warrant of my digital data, issued by a court in accordance to tight privacy-respecting laws. And I am happy the bandwidth-limited court can issue these against me, and against everyone around me, as opposed to no data ever being available for anyone.

That's quite different to Musk's minions taking a DB dump onto a USB stick.

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