Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me. The joke still goes over people heads sometimes.
Knowledge is power. Does it feel like the balance of power is currently tilted too far in favor of individuals?
So I am not suggesting drilling holes. I am pointing out the obvious.
Better to just wait for ship to sink naturally. From the holes.
This doesnt really detract from your overall point, but you may be underestimating how easy it already is for the government to tell how you will vote, without use of networking information. Just knowing someone’s educational level and zip code is enough to guess their voting preferences to a high degree of accuracy (the latter component being the reason why gerrymandering is so effective).
I suspect the vast majority of people on the street would absolutely unlock their phone at request when taking their phone to be repaired. But really, I doubt many actually personally know the people involved, will likely never see them ever again, and their judgement of the company involved and their hiring practices limited to "They have a decent enough looking storefront that says "Screen Repair" on it".
Weather they should do that is another discussion, but I can't imagine a working society if every position of trust like that breaks down. I can't buy groceries from someone I haven't personally vetted the farming practices of. I have to check every time I drink water for contaminants. There's a lot of outsourcing of trust already in society, and it kinda mostly works.
I have rather little to hide myself but I want desperately for you to be able to hide something. Otherwise we're together a worse deterrent against authorities behaving badly as we would otherwise be.
If most people can reason about the current historical moment as it relates to policy decisions, well I guess that's an equally dangerous sort of problem.
Firstly I am not sure what "current historical moment" means.
Generally most people don't have the will, knowledge or knowhow to understand political policy. Political policy seems to be constantly at odds with reality (if you listen to Dominic Cummings Q/A and/or Interviews he spells out how dysfunctional it is).
Even if that is the case more often than not now the power structures in the Western World are setup in a particular way where it is opaque, protects itself and does not serve the people that it is suppose to govern.
Without it, we are being manipulated because of all the stuff these parasites now know about us. All in the name of "enhancing the customer experience".. #puke
Let’s say they do that. What would you do next? Go over their photos? Private messages with their so? And then what? Laugh at something that you found there? Would you feel then that you proved some point? I just don’t understand how this scenario would play out in real life
Alternatively, you also ask them to release the Epstein files... :-)
But I "trust" the gouvernement in a different way that I trust you.
- With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff.
- I'm worried that you could judge me in a different way than the government would judge me. Because if you are a friend I care how you see me. But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care.
(Just playing devil's advocate here)
There isn't any reason to think people are obeying the laws in the privacy of their own spaces. Historically there are actually good reasons to think people are disobeying the law, but the laws are stupid and it is better not to check unless there is a political opponent to take out (eg, anti-homosexuality regulations).
There are definitely more countries that have blasphemy laws than are on the list on that page (e.g. Sri Lanka).
There are arguments for maintaining privacy but I don't really think this is one of them.
And I'm not sure who you are to say you are "below" the notice of the police. The police are primarily there to police the people at the bottom of society. The higher up the ladder of social status people climb the less they have to do with the police.
If you break E2E encryption, you can likely also impersonate and "do" things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/us/paul-jones-fertility-s...
Or like this guy?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/fertility-doctor-own-s...
Seems that 'fertility doctor' is a simple hack for personal breeding program. There are more of these cases too.
One of these guys had 100+, and until he was caught, had zero child support costs. He's like a cockoo bird.
(Not saying it's moral, hacking may or may not be moral.)
I'm not sure most people get a medical degree to "obtain one suitable mate and have a few offspring". I think most people do that to be a medical practitioner.
You could say people want to be medical practitioners because they want to find love and start a family but you could also say they want it because they want to be comfortably wealthy and financially secure.
Then an election happens and people who very much care about your previously non-illegal behavior gain access to years of historical data.
Trusting an organization is a category error. You cannot trust something composed of people who are regularly replaced every few years and who operate according to written rules ("laws") which they are allowed to change.
2) "as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care" - This is a fallacy. First, they can absolutely harass you even if you end up winning in court eventually. Second, what is legal and illegal changes over time. Third, plenty of things which are illegal (wrong according to legality) are not wrong according to morality (they harm no-one) - they are just illegal because humans who feel the need to control others wrote down a piece of text describing punishments for them.
3) Plenty of countries have stupid laws.:
Example 1: it's illegal to approve illegal actions - which basically means you can't ever argue for to change the law to make something legal because you'd be approving it. Usually it's not enforced as such but given how the law is often phrased, it often can be.
Example 2: it's illegal to endorse the use of violence - this is the stupidest law there is:
- It is by definition contradictory because all governments base their power on violence[0] so according to this law you can't support the existence of the government itself.
- It's contradictory in how it treats historical and current actions. You are free to celebrate the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, The French Revolution or Us independence, even though they were all violent actions - they were morally good but illegal under the laws at the time. But you can't say that current dictators should be killed. A friend got a warning from reddit just yesterday for saying not that a certain dictator should be assassinated but that he should be sentenced to death and then executed by anyone in a position to do so.
[0]: The government has such a strong monopoly that the violence just needs to be implied and most people will submit and the rest are used as examples "this is why it's stupid to fight a cop".
A lot of social media today will sanction you if you say such things as "it's ok to punch a Nazi". But won't sanction a Nazi for saying things like "white replacement theory".
AFAIK it was automated, she appealed and won. But it has a chilling effect on people and some won't bother appealing. I'd do it anyway just to waste their time because they have to use a human to review.
This is a good time to remind every tech worker that if you're working for an exploitative corporation, you have the moral obligation to do your job as poorly as you can: https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re...
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Corporations these days have way more power to control speech than governments just a few decades ago and some people still refuse to call it censorship because they find some obscure definition which says it has to be done by a government.
We will have to fight for the same freedoms as just a few generations ago because people learned nothing.