The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
thompson2026.com
thompson2026.com
I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind of dispute is that the bills give the serial numbers of the meters. The bill from Scottish Power gives the same meter serial numbers that are embossed on the front of my meters, and is therefore valid. The bill from Ovo Energy gives different serial numbers and is therefore in error.
Picture though the internal processes in Ovo Energy. A second clerk is tasked with attending to the problem. He has a choice. He can change the address to agree with the meter serial numbers, correcting the error. Or he can change the meter serial numbers to those for my address, compounding the error.
Since the meter serial numbers are confidential, to me and Scottish Power, Ovo Energy does not have the second option; they do not know the serial numbers (which are long, like a credit card number, not just 1,2,3,...). Thus the clerical error gets corrected, or just left, but not compounded.
My guess is that confidential information, (such as meter serial numbers, credit card numbers, and account numbers), are the front like of defence against both clerical error and fraud based on impersonation. It is a rather weak defence, but it is light weight, and seems to how much of billing and billing disputes work.
We all have lots to hide: the confidential information that the system needs us to keep confidential to stop clerical errors from compounding.
Having nothing to hide is fine. Nothing to hide and doing nothing wrong is least likely to cause trouble.
The blog post’s argument that someone would be more likely to get watched if they start hiding after not hiding is not valid. ALL encrypted and unencrypted communication is a valid target for analysis, but ANY encrypted traffic is obviously more of a concern, just like one person walking into a store brandishing a gun is as alarming as 5 brandishing guns, and it doesn’t matter whether they used to not carry guns into the store.
This statement completely fails to engage with the post.
In fact, the parent's whole "argument" ignores the prevalence of encrypted communications in the modern world. To use their (absurd) gun analogy, the modern internet is close to an open-carry state. (Europeans: this means everyone can carry a gun visibly.)
Everyone uses https by default. Phone communications and texts are the least secure by far.
PS There is nothing wrong with the GP's anecdote. It is an excellent argument, understandable argument for casual importance of privacy.
If there were 5, I’d be even more alarmed.
If everyone in the store and outside the store were always brandishing guns, then it would be a very dangerous place.
Speaking of dangerous places- how about the U.S.?
The U.S. gun death rate is approximately 13.7 per 100,000 people, while the UK rate is roughly 0.04 per 100,000—making the U.S. rate over 300 times higher. This is likely because of UK’s stringent gun laws.
So, if everyone hid their internet traffic, does that mean there would be a 300% increase in hacker crime and convictions? And wouldn’t governments and companies be more likely to develop and use tools for spying on their citizens and employees?
> Ultimately, 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.
Your framing suggests that hiding personal messages is akin to carrying a gun into a store, and it's exactly that parallel that the blog post is railing against. Encrypting messages needs to be normal and expected.
Its just absurd to think you have nothing to hide. If it's not from the state, then it is from other people that mean you harm. That will take advantage of the information you are broadcasting.
Your second sentence is incomprehensible. What are you trying to say?
some people go through trash, find bills or other stuff that should have been shredded or burned. others even make use of magazines one has read, which is a measure in social engineering and that thing creeps do in chats which is one step beyond that line where kids tell others boat loads of stuff on discord.
then there is even the kind that takes out trash specific to you and drops it somewhere along the way where you walk your dog. just to get you paranoid enough for the next steps.
there's a guy who uses glue and glitter to seal screws and stuff. the glitter creates a pattern that cannot be reproduced. manufacturers do similar things with special stickers. it's really clever but will get you only so far.
it's mostly beyond the scope of the topic, sorry for wasting your time. pointless stuff happened to me and I remember stories and people, whose lives have been ruined and their characters FUBARed, from the past every time I read "nothing to hide".
it's 2025, corporations have completely normalized (the verb as it is used in military contexts, leveled) privacy and turned anonymity upside down, as have social and classic media, both small and big. it's incredibly strange to me that so few regard the consequences as an aggregation of transgressions rather than just violations at points in time.
"whatever bad thing we do, makes the next one so much easier."
Aggregation comes with exponential growth. Why is the law not aware of how badly their ignorance will backfire? Just because, apparently, which is why it's almost pointless to temper proof anything because if you are "hit". nothing and nobody can or will adequately compensate for the loss.
Having to spend a bit of time on mails and phone calls is nothing compared to the consequences of what can and does happen.
One lifetime and there were civilizations and "Empires", or rather colonies before, all with potential and it's because of small "levels" of deliberate ignorance, not the selectivity bias kind of our brains, that leads to civil conflicts, rises in crime, first small, then violence, rape, murder rates explode.
Software and Web Engineers are especially ignorant, I noticed in the last few years. And people think it's a result of demand, or rather a lack thereof and that the cycle that creates an "I don't care" mindset can't be fiddled with for the positive, even though engineers are literally the switch.
There's an inverted spotlight effect at play here, a maximized bystander effect and inverted egocentric bias. Engineers and intelligent academics believe they matter less than they actually do, which results in learned irrelevance, and culminates in the tendency to rationalize and defend existing power structures and "systems" even when they harm pretty much everybody up- and downstream.
I keep getting reminded of Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" where he attempts to show with data over time how everything is getting better, and I think he hints at the nature of spikes and such but he completely failed to account for the aggregation of all these spikes, which there is no data for because law makers and enforcers are, apparently not willing to do the required work now vs leave it for later when the shit hits the fan.
But maybe that's just the reason why human colonies die.
“Companies cannot just go charge random people”
And yet they do. Anyone can send anyone a bill.
The other case has been miscommunication over phone or email to someone actually requesting to change billing provider. Or error on the part of the potential customer.
I've had a bill from some random billing provider. In my case it is common for folks newly arriving in the block of flats to get the digits of the address transposed. Due to them using the common English convention, whereas the part of Scotland I'm in uses a different convention.
If you replace the word "company" in your sentence with "employee", do you come to a different conclusion?
A "company" is merely an amalgamation of the employees under it. When it comes to customer service you're often left feeling the impact of individual employees and the motivators that influence them. For example, metrics about times spent on calls, number of tickets worked on, new accounts created, resolutions that end in the company's favour etc.
You're absolutely right that Ovo energy has no legal basis to charge money to OP, and he would very likely win his dispute. But the _employee_ gets the ticket put in front of them and is heavily incentivised to close the ticket quickly and in the company's favour. The employee won't be the one going to court, and might not even be the person who picks the ticket up next when OP indignantly responds.
So if OP's meter number is as easily accessible as OP's address and the question for the employee quickly comes down to either: - Update OPs bill with the "correct" meter number. Meter number now matches address, bill is now valid. Submit response and bill. Move on to next ticket.
- Update ticket with "correct" address, send bill to other address. (new addressee may pay or may make same claim as OP). Submit response and send bill. Move on to next ticket.
The support employee doesn't know which option is actually the correct one unless they spend time digging into the issue to actually solve it well. But everything in the customer support world is almost always set up to disincentivise this. The result is the employee making the quickest choice that matches with their incentives of closing ticket and the company getting money.
Whether the employee acted rightly or wrongly doesn't really matter much, they're not the ones going to court over it. They might not even end up being reprimanded.
(If you can't tell I've been through the wringer on this multiple times and finding leverage to get the customer support employees to solve your case well is increasingly a nightmare.
Sorry for the long response).
I feel fortunate I did not yet have to deal with the particular brand of madness you describe.
Unfortunately the dystopian levels incompetence of massive PLCs means it's often less hassle to quickly prove your correctness, regardless of things like burden of proof etc.
The oldest account I found is in a religious book from 1832 [1]: "We must have nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but, and this is the important bit, this is in the context of your relationship with Christ.
Later accounts are mostly from judicial documents like "well tell us what happened, if you have nothing to hide, you'll have nothing to fear".
And later on we start to see the current form of the argument related to privacy, except now this argument is never directly used to erode it. It will always be in some form of "ok now we have to do this collective thing because of criminals, because of terrorism, because of protect the children, etc.". If you search "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" 100% of the results are about how it is a logical fallacy, nobody at all seems to defend the argument and yet, here we are!
Food for thought:
- this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)
- many governments, organizations and in any case the people in position of power and authority can develop a god complex (power corrupts etc.)
So unless I end up dealing with an all-loving and all-forgiving entity I could fully trust, I'd like to keep my right to privacy, thank you very much!
[1] https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Sermons_on_the_Spiritual...
Right now you have half the country downright giddy about federal agents terrorizing broad swaths of Americans, driving recklessly down their freeways, waving guns around their neighborhoods, bodyslamming random passersby, all fundamentally because half the country believes the only reason someone could not be giddy about this is because they "have something to hide."
You may feel that you’re supporting some radical left-wing group you think is cool that just wants people to let everyone be free to think and act how they want, but privacy / hiding communication goes both ways.
You may also be supporting terrorists that would rather be spitting on you and bombing your family and friends than reading your manifesto on the right to watch freaky crap.
They were never really distrustful of the government. People who really don't trust the government want to downsize the parts that can kick down your door and point a gun at you. These people have demonstrated time and again that they want more of that, because they actually trust that institutions of state violence will be on their side and uphold their interests.
Instead what they oppose are parts of the government they suspect are helping people and groups they dislike. This is what the American right reliably can't stand, for all the flavor of the month posturing they might engage in to keep things from getting stale.
As long as I can remember, the Republican party has been full of hypocrisy and ignorant denial. But this sheer ability of Dear Leader's to make people dance to his tune of outright harming themselves has taken it to another level (I guess there is a reason why he was (is) a really successful con artist). At this point anybody earnestly caring about personal liberty should consider the whole Republican party a sick joke. We need some real opposition ("Libertarian" party isn't well poised for that either), and some real voting systems that break a duopoly (eg Ranked Pairs). But first we really just need to take our country back from these fascists who have completely lost the plot of American ideals.
Or are you saying that anonymity is not "cool" because radical left-wingers like it and that lets rightwingers do it as well?
Are you saying that advocating for anonymity is not nice because terrorists (who? I dont know many of them) will spit on you (do terrorists do that? does that make someone a terrorist?) and bomb not only you but you family and friends and not read my manifesto on anonymity, while insinuating that the only reason anybody wants anonymity is because they want to watch freaky "crap"?
Pardon, my french, but you sound like a troll from some intelligence agency. It just doesnt make a lot of sense.
Incidentally here is that quote, with Ian Richardson as Robespierre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOW6OfeOW10
That being said, Robespierre was a key participant of 'La Terreur' where tens of thousands of people where hastily judged and executed and he himself ended up executed 4 months after that speech. [1]
[1] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_lors_de_la_s%C3%A9an... (French version)
Also note how it is some sort of goal not a statement on not having something to hide. I guess in line with "may the one without sin throw the first stone".
As the dead web continues to emerge, content looks less like apples on a tree and more like sand on the beach.
And the act of looking for a misshapen grain of sand becomes absurd.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46250556
> In practice I'm not even getting "tracked". No one is likely to be looking up my license plate and looking at my movements, because I don't do anything that would warrant that kind of attention
Another example of such a belief is that "humans are inherently evil" which seems to have been planted in Western society by the concept of original sin. Interestingly the idea that sin was about our inherent badness didn't really arise until the struggle against Gnosticism [1] hundreds of years after Jesus died.
Now the belief is pervasive in secular society thanks to stories like "Lord of the Flies".
It's fascinating how even though we can call ourselves non religious we can still carry these beliefs around.
If you're still in Sydney I'd argue that large numbers of people paddled out off of Bondi Beach because of a pervasive Australian belief that there's always a few arseholes but most people are fundamentally good and community support is better than nothing.
You likely saw a couple of extremists repeatedly tackled and then dropped by the public and police, and near real time running in to help victims.
That's somewhat contra to the bleak of "humans are inherently evil".
Maybe the message of Lord of the Flies was that nuclear weapons and the Cold War depressed at least one author and that boys need mentors.
Maybe it's an issue in general with the On the Beach genre, from Shute to Winton: https://theshovel.com.au/2025/08/20/tim-winton-wonders-why-n...:
I just had a discussion the other day with somebody who outright told me that they think humans are inherently evil and must be managed under a system to keep in order. I don't think it's an uncommon belief and nor do I think it's a bleak world because that belief exists, it's just a mistaken belief.
I would argue that you see the belief raise its head far more when people are interacting with others who they don't consider in their "in-group".
Already there friend.
I feel that I have nothing to hide, but I do my darnedest to ensure that it costs a maximal amount of time and effort to find that out.
If a random stranger (law enforcement or otherwise) wants to know shit about me, then I'm immediately creeped out and the last thing I want to do is make (online) stalking of me an easy task. The harder it is, the more likely they'll give up and move on to someone else (pending their reasons).
As it should be for everyone.
Edited to add: One thing I can tell you from experience: law enforcement only look for things that will confirm their suspicions. They do not look for counter evidence, no matter how obvious it is or how easy it is to find - even within government records to which they would already have access.
As such, beware what trail you leave, if it suits the right (wrong) agenda, it will be used to point in the worst possible direction.
Though you made the right determination later on, this is what you need to correct first. You don't have to be a murderer to have something to hide. Everyone does, no matter how innocent you are.
Imagine that you're a young girl. Is it safe to expose the GPS tracks of your daily commutes? Let's cut to the other end of the spectrum. Imagine that you're the chief of a law enforcement agency. How about exposing your GPS tracks now? Even information about newborn babies should be kept private.
Always be aware of the consequences of sharing your information, when you must do so. The narrative 'I have nothing to hide' actively discourages such concerns and precautions, even if it's just a feeling. It encourages bad security practices at an individual level throughout the society. That's why this article is so pertinent. It's justifiably hostile towards that claim.
Something to hide often occurs retroactively, when evil people gain power today they didn't have yesterday.
All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters.
Fraudsters often get their hands on government data through breeches and bribery.
Also fraudsters pretend to be government agents to get data from big tech companies. So any channel that governments use to get data from tech companies is abused by fraudsters to commit crime.
Fraud is a very big deal. The UK economy loses 219 billion per year to fraud. Our national deficit payment is 93 billion per year and we spend 188 billion on the NHS.
If we improved privacy of all of our citizens then the savings from fraud reduction would cover our entire government deficit
Personally, I don't like the idea of someone hiding data and methodology just because of not wanting feedback.
"You don't want continuing abuse" is quite different from "you don't want feedback".
However, I have personally seen people get overly defensive when someone has pointed out a major error in their methodology and they have then gone on to hide their working rather than trying to fix the issue. Often it's because they are not particularly expert in that field and don't really understand the issue that needs to be fixed.
I've also seen plenty of bullies in the workplace too.
Nobody is completely law avoiding when the books of laws and regulations get thick enough. Especially if the government decides to take an interest in you.
We are stopping corruption here, so only corrupt people could oppose such decision and they should be immediately investigated.
(I think I first might have come across this beautifully succinct and unfortunately very true counter in a Reddit AMA with Edward Snowden way back when, but I might be misremembering.)
Hell, look at me, I care and I accepted some of it as price to pay for house peace.
all can and will be used to induce stress or to divert attention of the young ones.
governments used to build massive societies and create rules and order and kaizen infrastructures that would get us as far away from the dark ages as possible ... but here we are closing that gap again. Go VCs! Go Agents! Go Puppies of Wall Street! Go work for LLM companies instead of using those big capable brains of yours for something other than personalized copypastable copypastacopypasta ...
"the other girls and kids made it through, and so will you, just let it happen, let it be" and so it goes ...
Average people see zero equivalence between sending nudes or their bank pin to a specific stranger and Google keeping a record of every website they've ever visited.
The point is that there are many things that should be kept private/secret and often the need for that secrecy isn't obvious to people who have never been in particular situations. A woman trying to escape from an abusive relationship may need to keep her location secret to avoid being murdered by her ex, but your typical white male who declares "nothing to hide" may have difficulty in understanding that, whereas they may be able to grasp why their PIN should be kept secret.
My aim would be to get people to understand that everyone has stuff that should be kept secret and that it varies according to their circumstances.
You could have named any other group (and been far more accurate in your assumption of a disregard for privacy, by the way) but you chose White men (like the ones who codified "a right to privacy" in the first place). Why?
The cop left and the manager turned to me and said, "just do whatever they say, we have nothing to hide." I thought "but what about Mrs. Crenshaw in unit 566?" I didn't say it, but the manager seemed to think his argument covered that too.
Large surveillance systems inevitably build baselines. They don't just detect crimes; they detect patterns and anomalies relative to whatever becomes "normal".
The problem with "nothing to hide" is that it defaults to maximal disclosure. Data is persistent, aggregatable, and reinterpretable as norms and regimes change. The data doesn't.
This isn't purely individual. Your disclosures can expose others through contact graphs and inference, regardless of intent. And it doesn't matter whether the collector is the state or a company; aggregation and reuse work the same way.
It's a position of privilege to be able to state "nothing to hide" and depends on other people not being racist/sexist/classist etc. It's such a blinkered and sheltered view to hold.
There are at least some people who would respond by (still) saying "I have nothing to hide." They are proud of their moral choices and confident in their convictions. Arrest them if you dare.
I wonder if the author still has contempt for them?
The article opens with:
>> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide."
Which isn't literally saying "I hate them" but I'm not sure how else to interpret "a special kind of contempt." Regardless, I've edited my original post.
When Advael responded "the author doesn't mention hating these people at all", I went back to the article and checked. Advael was right, but I can understand where my hallucination came from. The first three sentences read:
> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator.
A "special kind of contempt" mixed with "cold, hard anger" really seems like hatred to me.
(Anyway, this really isn't the point I was trying to make.)
My spin, as a recovering perfectionist, is when you've done everything you can to be "innocent" and the political or whatever wind changes, the pit of despair is a real and devastating thing. When this happens, sometimes the decisions that are made are desperate.
A change in regieme is a downright terrifying variant of Pascal's Wager - where you are judged for heresies against ideologies that were obscure or didn't even exist yet.
The Khmer Rogue made being an intellectual or wearing glasses something to hide. All sorts of absurd ideological hypotheticals become terrifying.
Fast forward a few years and the Nazi regime used census results to go after every family that was undesirable for them using the census data they bought from IBM.
Privacy and anonymity are not needed until they are desperately required.
But IBM knew what they were assisting with, and even pre-WW2 was already assisting the Nazi regime of 1933-1939. And they didn't stop come WW2, if anything IBM opened new subsidiaries and continued throughout the second world war.
"(...) IBM leased, rather than sold, its machines. The company retained control of punch-card supply and provided service through subsidiaries. Each set of cards was custom-designed to Nazi requirements. He later wrote that the IBM headquarters in New York oversaw these arrangements through subsidiaries across Europe"
"(...) IBM New York created a subsidiary in Poland, Watson Business Machines, after the 1939 invasion. The firm managed railway traffic in the General Government and ran a punch-card printing shop near the Warsaw Ghetto. He stated that this subsidiary reported through Geneva to IBM New York, and revenues were transferred accordingly."
All I’m trying to say is that the amount of information being collected for each person can be used very nefariously and targeted as individuals we wouldn’t have any chance to resist this dystopian future.
Here's a software engineer who was incarcerated into the worst jail in the country, yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keonne_Rodriguez
He Built a Privacy Tool. Now He’s Going to Prison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fshsk8MCAf4
Privacy advocates never admit that there is not only a "next" government abusing surveillance, but also a "current" one, which uses surveillance for beneficial purposes.
"Banning encrypted chat will just mean the bad people moved to banned platforms". Perhaps, but some bad people have to operate where victims are (Facebook stalkers, eBay cons, ...)
"Police should be forced to just do... actual police work."
It's pretty reasonably for police to want to increase the chances and speed of resolution.
We should champion and defend privacy, in spite of the good reasons to weaken it. There's no need to strawmen.
Humans arrive at conclusions about other humans based on information. Sometimes these conclusions are incorrect because humans aren't perfect at reasoning and this happens more often with some kinds of information.
Therefore, it's perfectly rational to hide/not-disclose/obscure some information to lessen the chance that others take action based on faulty conclusions.
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
That's a decent list, but the real list is even broader. Are you a lawyer litigating against a multinational company? Or planning to? Imagine if the company knew exactly who you, and every potential litigant, talked to. Or maybe you're trying to start a new political party. Or looking for a new job without alerting your employer. There were stories (unfortunately I can't find them at the moment) of nurses getting worse salary offers if they were in debt, on the logic that the desperate will settle for less. DoorDash would steal tips and use them to pay salary [1], something impossible with private, cash-based tips. And retailers will use every bit of data they have on you to price discriminate (without telling you, of course) [2].
Surveillance harms you in every way, from the most significant to the most trivial. You're always better off hiding, even if you think you don't have to. Knowledge is power, and knowledge of you is power over you.
[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/02/25/doordash-sett...
[2] https://spyboy.blog/2024/11/24/unfair-pricing-tactics-target...
Doesn't mean you or anyone else has a right to know what it is and it doesn't mean I'm doing anything wrong either. We should all admit that we have lots we want to hide from other people and that's just fine and normal.
If you wish to hide something, why have you leaked it in the first place?
Why not ask the other question? Why are you trying to hide public information to begin with? Why are you introducing encryption on top of an underlying public interface.
This is intentionally different from are there things one would generally not be to be widely accessible or generally public.
There is nothing to hide if it is already public, because it is already public, you can't hide it even if you want to, you're only making it more difficult for a general member of the public to access that data. Even if you consider that "hiding", the source is still public.
The argument goes, there are a lot of laws and there are virtually an infinite variety of possible circumstances which could trigger a possible violation making it impossible for anyone to know if their statements might appear relevant to a prosecutor.
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?si=9ZYuVSlPsfEgQyc9
Of course, if you don’t have time to watch that excellent presentation, just crib this one: National Lawyer’s Guild of Detroit, MI: “When the cops come calling, what do you do? SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
so now comes the question...
"How much do you trust a human, despite being your favourite?".....
We need to learn about 'trust' and its role in our lives!
Information is power! And 'trust' me, you don't want to give it to anyone over you!
The upcoming era of transparency will come in the form of compliances (or, chains) you will never withdraw yourself from! Surely facility and security will baited for this!
Also, with the rise in the fields of biotech and nano-tech, infused with A.I., they are preparing us to be their 'lab rats', and they don't need our consents! We shouldn't be ignoring this at all!
The popular, well funded politicians haven't exactly served their constituents well in the privacy domain...
Living in actually existing fascism requires adoption of anonymity & privacy preservation processes. You have so much worth protecting because you have everything to lose.
Post your full name, address, social security number, date of birth, mothers maiden name and other security questions, list of active logins and passwords and URLs, your full body scan nudes, sexual fantasies, diary/journal, your ashamed moments in your life, sly or trickster things you've done to others, sordid family secrets, and more.
Oh, that was a no? I guess you DO have something to hide.
- Sure, but why are you closing the door when taking sh*? Is your sh*ing somehow special?
Their argument is a "pathology of the present tense," a failure of imagination so profound it borders on a moral crime. What they fail to understand is that by living as an open book, they are creating the most dangerous weapon imaginable: a baseline of "normalcy." They are steadily creating a data profile for the State's machine, teaching its algorithms what a "good, transparent citizen" looks like. Every unencrypted text, every thoughtless search, every location-tagged post is another brick in the wall of their own cage.
And then comes the part they can't (or won't) fathom. The context shifts. The political winds change. The Overton window slams shut on a belief they once held. A book they read is declared subversive. A group they donated to is re-classified as extremist. A joke they told is now evidence of a thoughtcrime. Suddenly, for the first time, they have something to hide.
So they reach for the tools of privacy. They download the encrypted messenger. They fire up the VPN. They start to cover their tracks.
And in that single act, they trigger the Deviancy Signal.
Their first attempt at privacy, set against their own self-created history of total transparency, is a screaming alarm to the grown surveillance machine. It's the poker player with a perfect tell, or the nocturnal animal suddenly walking in daylight. Their very attempt to become private is the most public and suspicious act they could possibly commit. They have not built an effective shield, as they have painted a target on their own back. By the time they need privacy, their own history has made seeking it an admission of guilt.
But the damage doesn't end with your own self-incrimination. It radiates outward, undoing the careful work of everyone around you. Think of your friend who has practiced perfect operational security, who has spent years building a private life to ensure they have no baseline for the state to analyze. They are a ghost in the machine. Then they talk to you. Your unshielded phone becomes the listening device they never consented to. You take their disciplined effort to stay invisible and you shout it into a government microphone, tying their identity to yours in a permanent, searchable log. You don't just contrast with their diligence; you actively dismantle it.
On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state's pool, making any ripple of dissent ... any deviation ... starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.
There is only one way to disarm this weapon: we must destroy its premise. We must obliterate the baseline. The task is not merely to hide, but to make privacy the default, to make encryption a reflex, to make anonymity a universal right. We must create so much noise that a signal is impossible to find. Our collective goal must be to make a "normal" profile so rare that the watchers have nothing to compare us to. We must all become deviations.
The truth is that many people are cowards and even more people are just small-minded. The problem of the "I have nothing to hide"-excuse is that it shows thst this person has no concept about how their small personal ideas would affect the world once you roll them out in scale. Not only that but it shows that they haven't understood how power is organized in their democratic societies.
Let's say we would have nothing to hide and we give up our rights to the people we as the voters are meant to hold accountable. Even if it is a benevolent government filled with honest actors, large scale surveillance has the problem that there will be false positives. Surveil 360 million people each day and with an totally utopic accuracy of 99% and you still get 3.6 million false positives a day. In reality however these processes are much less accurate and the people who use those powers much less benevolent and honest, e.g. it is not uncommon that police look up their exes, spouses, people they personally hate etc.
The biggest problem however is that we have a division of power for a reason in democracies, and the people who vote giving up power in order to give more to a government is bad actually. Democracies need to be designed in such way they can survive one or two governments that try to abolish that system. Giving them a "spy on everybody" -power coupled with let's say secret courts is a good way to risk that form of government for generations who then have to fight bloody civil wars and revolutions to get the power back.
Like a journalist.
But the worst thing is that the sheer amounts of compute available to even fairly small organizations, never mind governments, means that it's so easy to data mine stuff like that. And now there's AI to do the same with unstructured data. And meanwhile our corporate overlords are happy to profit from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46349281
I'm well aware of the possible and even unavoidable consequences of the current trajectory.
But this is a conscious decision to try to shape the norm so that the current dystopian zillionaire future would not happen fully.
My reasoning is most likely the humanely typical post-hoc rationalization and strategic reasoning, but I try to think good old MLK quote fits it.
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"
I just want to remind everyone that the technology and the police and all of that crap utterly failed to prevent the attacks at Brown and MIT. Total and complete failure. The only thing that mattered was some burned out genius that the world forgot who was illegally living the basement of the engineering building because he had literally nowhere else to go. And then they didn't even catch the killer, he controlled all the events and killed himself two entire days before he was found.
Mass surveillance is a false god as are background checks and pretty much every other measure human take to try and feel safer because there is no safety and never was.
Those of you who would ask someone for financial information after they say this, would you also say "it's hot out side" if they described something as cool during the summer?
Ultimately, given the complexity of security, expecting there to be some cultural shift on privacy is silly unless it's made trivially easy. We can't get people to eat right, exercise, or control their screen time and social media use and all of those have more immediate and tangible consequences.
I appreciate the message, but I don't think the call to action is practical.
To think, "no presence" = no problems. If I were a dumb machine, I just might decide to pick up all citizens with birth certs that are also internet ghosts. What was the point then?
Me: "What is your salary? Can I see your medical records?"
Them: "Oh wait"
https://thompson2026.com/declaration_of_war/
Umm- not sure we’re playing with a full deck here.
We are not playing. At all.
It's all hands on deck, is what the (would-be) Captain is saying.
Be there or be square.
Not sure if the world can handle anonympotus.
Just taking it for a ride?
In many ways, I have lived my life in a way opposite to this. My genome is public, many of my life affairs are public[0], and I have had a child in a manner[1] that many people[2] have expressed antipathy for. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely that my family and I will face consequences for this. I won’t pretend I have nothing to fear.
So why do it? Perhaps it’s worth looking at others who have done the same. Being gay in America was a great risk once. The mechanism of defence in that society was for homosexual people to operate in what we now call the “don’t ask; don’t tell” environment. By having a general taboo about discussing sexual identity in certain contexts it was possible for gay people to not be threatened. If you didn’t know anyone’s sexual identity how could you harm the homosexuals among them?
Why then did gay people decide to abandon the safety of privacy and push for public acceptance? Do they regret this new world where many gay people are known to be gay? I think that as a whole, those who are gay prefer to live in this society of open acceptance than that society of private tolerance.
I won’t pretend that all places in the world are like this. I would be much more hesitant to do this in the country of my birth: India. And even California’s checkered history with gay marriage is outmatched by, say, the Netherlands.
So it’s not risk-free to be public, but sometimes it’s worth it. In our case, I think humanity stands to benefit greatly from modern biotechnology. I think many people who would previously struggle to have children or who may fear passing on some disease can now safely have children. I think this is very important.
And I think I would rather we defend the medicine required for this in law and legislation (like GINA) than that we silently and privately tolerate it. My wife and I are normal people. My daughter so far is healthy and I pray she grows up and lives as such. I want you to know that this is what this technology is for: normal people to increase the chance they will have healthy children.
That’s why I’m public. Not because I have nothing to hide. But that I think it’s sometimes worthwhile to say “I could have hidden this but I would prefer for it to be publicly accepted”.
0: on my blog you will see a pregnancy log, and an IVF log, and pre-implantation screening results
1: we sequenced every embryo and chose one unaffected by the condition we share
2: from right wing non-profits to members of this forum or normal people reading the news, examples to follow
https://www.liveaction.org/news/reproductive-startup-sequenc... (Inaccurate accusation here - the third was aneuploid)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/16/orchid-... (Scroll down to see us - click comments to see the overwhelming opposition but with gratifyingly some support)
What really matters is judiciary due process and the legitimacy of a government.
Companies are the ones gathering data, it's not the government doing it.
Before the internet, governments already had data on their citizens.
The internet makes it more difficult for the government to catch criminals and fraudsters.
If you live in Russia or China or under Trump's administration, there are good reasons to hide.
If you live in a country where freedoms and due process are respected, there is no point in hiding, UNLESS you can really argue that due process and freedoms are eroding, but that's a different debate.
It's my understanding that, organically or under external influences, many democratic countries in EU are at the emerging risk of going full fascists. I see that in France, Le Pen & friends don't hide the fact that they'd make a new constitution.
Richest guy in the world has vowed to use his propaganda power to make this happen for the sake of cancelling the EU, fun times
This assumes usage of collected data stays the same forever. But regime changes do happen, and once the data has been allowed to be collected, you have no power. I think Trumpland was once considered a state where freedoms and due process were once respected.
Considering the reckless lawlessness of the current regime of "the shining beacon of democracy", I wonder if they could retroactively convict "murders of unborn babies" and find them by trawling to online health data and looking back at gaps of female periods.
History and current events show that this is not a static fact you can rely on in the slightest.
Indeed, and there were some notorious examples of how that was abused for large scale oppression (with Holocaust being the pinnacle), so why would we want them to have even more data.