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Comment by sjducb | Hacker News Reader

When people say they have nothing to hide I like to remind them about fraud and criminals.

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

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> All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250

You don‘t need fraudsters just a run of the mill bully is enough. I remember a phase in my life where I had to do some high visibility reporting. I showed all underlying facts, methodology and conclusions and every week the bully tore into a minor detail devaluing my work and distracting from vital tasks. Only when I started shielding data and my reasoning as private and just delivering high level summary results I was able to put an end to it.

Not wishing to join the bully's side, but I think making something private to prevent discussion/criticism has a bad smell about it. It's possible (to someone who knows neither you nor the bully) that the bully had some valid suggestions and that you became over defensive in allowing that to become a distraction rather than saying something like "okay, but can you make these suggestions after the meeting and we can work through them later".

Personally, I don't like the idea of someone hiding data and methodology just because of not wanting feedback.

Well, it's a judgment call. Is this critic operating in good faith, or not? The reporter is not necessarily in the best position to judge. On the other hand, they have the best grasp of all the details of the interaction with this (alleged) bully.

"You don't want continuing abuse" is quite different from "you don't want feedback".

Quite - I fully admit that I know nothing about that particular situation.

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.

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