Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide' (2011)
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
I would not be opposed to having every bit of my life tracked IF I could also track and datamine every little detail about the people in power, the governors, the local police, the algorithms used in processing my information and the names/dates/places of people who ever see my information or a derivation thereof.
It is time to turn that argument back on its proponents:
- Dear local police force, if you have nothing to hide, why do you object that people show your location in real time?
- Dear Senator, if you have nothing to hide, why do you object we see in real time your phone logs/emails/credit card transactions?
- Dear Insurance Company, if you have nothing to hide, why do you object we access you risk model?
- etc.
Absolute prevention isn't viable, but the same thing is true of myriad other offenses. Just because we can't absolutely prevent fraud doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it a bad thing and work to reduce the amount of it. I don't really see why invasion of privacy is substantively different - though certainly it could be.
"I am not suggesting we discard all privacy, just that whenever we discard privacy, we do so symmetrically. This will still result in a power imbalance, but there will be some accountability."
"Symmetrically" might be easiest to sell, but I don't think it has anything else going for it. Really, those with power should be expected to give up more privacy than us if they expect our cooperation. Alternatively, they could give up other power to balance.
In any case, we are of course talking rules of thumb; any individual proposal should be considered on its merits.
Person 1: "I really hate that Politician X lied about Y"
Person 2: "Yeah, he really deserves to die."
Person 2, though he's probably not thinking of killing Politician X, now has to think twice about saying this if it's over any wires.
But the intent of the message is to express extreme hatred for political hypocrisy, not to actually kill anyone.
The idea of destroying the government used to be a thing people could discuss in private, and while it rarely panned out to anything, it helped spread political ideas.
Now if people say these things in private, they are at serious risk of being targeted by the NSA or other agencies that have access to their communications.
It can be very time consuming trying to explain yourself to random people whose opinions you really shouldn't care about. Because they don't keep those private.
Ironically, it is perhaps these people who have the most to lose from surveillance?
As most of you already know, the difference between rich and poor has been increasing since the 70s/80s. Most of the nothing-to-hiders are probably ordinary middle class folks. What if the difference between rich and poor continue to increase? Normally, people could protest against this sort of thing, and get taxes on the rich raised to even things out a bit.
The surveillance-police-state that has been created in the name of fighting terrorism and drugs, could be used for other things, too, no? Like against protesters in favor of some income re-distribution.
I wouldn't be surprised if the nothing-to-hiders will wake up one day, realizing that they are living in a very unpleasant society: A society where the elite is living in luxury and the rest in squalor. A society where "those with connections" don't get punished for crimes, but where the rest are punished harshly. A society where those who win the lottery of birth will do well, but where the average guy has no opportunities.
And because of the surveillance-police-state, they will not be able to change it.
It starts with eight paragraphs attacking a strawman: "Can I see your credit card bills for the last year?" As though anyone seriously thinks all financial data should be public. Everyone has something to hide from you, obviously, the issue is whether they have anything to hide from the NSA.
After reflecting on the ethereality of privacy, the author argues from fictional evidence, reminding us how evil surveillance was in Kafka and Orwell. The proponents of "nothing to hide" do not live in a dystopia. You don't need to convince them that surveillance is bad in North Korea, you need to convince them that it's bad in a liberal democracy with independent press and functioning courts.
The author explains that governments collect far more than most realize. This is very true, but it does nothing to defeat "nothing to hide", whose proponents should be fine with an NSA that is literally omniscient. Nobody believes government data collection is morally justified because it is ineffective.
He worries the government will gain an incomplete view of suspects, persecuting innocent people who would be exonerated by details they can't see. In the real world, law enforcement doesn't get to decide who is guilty. If their incompetence leads to investigations of innocent people, the result is an embarrassing defeat in court once more evidence comes to light, which they are obviously motivated to avoid. Arguably, one way to prevent prosecution of innocents is to ensure the government has more surveillance, so law enforcement can correctly distinguish aspiring meth manufacturers from writers of Breaking Bad fanfics.
By the time the author gets to his strongest point, that data scooped up by intelligence agencies might leak to the public, he does nothing to support that such an event is likely. How many instances are there where real people have been affected by leaks of data collected by the NSA/FBI/CIA? There may be good reasons to worry about such leaks anyway, like known leaks from private companies and local police departments, but none of these are presented.
Of course, the author objects to demands for the "dead bodies" of privacy erosion: "But if this is the standard to recognize a problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized." Yes, and that's the point: Proponents of "nothing to hide" believe there is no actual harm to anyone who isn't guilty, and the author presents no counterexamples to dispel this belief.
Or are you suggesting that the argument of privacy exists only as a function of context? (e.g. One doesn't desire one's future employer to be made aware of one's disease, but one does desire his/her physician to be made aware...)
Do you not follow the Snowden case?
You honestly think big media conglomerates constitute a perfectly independent press?
.
I've heard, in a big USA city, radio ads calling for locals to report people torrenting files out of coffee houses. That for ratting out your fellow citizens, for what amounts to nothing more than distributing shared culture, you will receive money in return.
So what if the press is "independent"? What if I just completely disagree with talking points fed to the "independent" press by rich and powerful companies who stand to gain from human suffering.
In addition, can you please explain how courts in western countries are "functioning" properly now that NSA-based parallel construction methods are becoming prevalent? How is that fair? How is the surveillance even legal?
Finally, in the real world, if you had the ability to pick between a speedy, censorship-free GuiFi CJDNS mesh network running anonymously over I2P, and the government sponsored spy-filled funfest alternative, would you say that all GuiFi users must have "something to hide"? Is there NO reason to have anonymity?
Anonymity is unquestionably a benefit for consumers. It is a benefit to protect one's identity. There is _zero_ upside to having all of your data recorded 24/7, indefinitely, by agencies with the power to kill you and to ruin your life. Worse, they can do so for purely political reasons: see Aaron Swartz.
Except that the government can change your life without any trial. The government can put you on a list that requires you to undergo extra screening at the airport. Or you might even get put on the No Fly List. There is no way you can contest being placed on either list. These sorts of lists may just be confined to air travel for now, but after the next crisis, who knows how they add "security" for our own safety?
Also, it's not clear that this list would be any smaller if there were less government surveillance. Presumably, the less the government knows about you the more paranoid they would be about letting you on an airplane, given you share a name with a known terrorist.
And, frankly, if the single most egregious collateral damage to result from a spy apparatus as large as the NSA/CIA/FBI is that some people have trouble getting on airplanes, that's really not that bad.
Consider the recent google case where they reported a guy to authorities for child porn...
Couldn't any ISP simply insert child porn into someone's email and report them? Doesn't that mean ISPs could go after anyone they have a personal grudge against. Everyone will believe the evidence the ISP produces.
Edit: never mind, I missed the second link, whose first comment has a good one (assuming it's faithful to the paper):
I don't think it's strange at all, if you find something that you completely agree with and is articulated better than you could phrase it yourself, why go through the work of making the same argument with the same reasoning but in a poorer form?
I'm pretty sure the core argument doesn't take several pages to simply express. (The abstract fails too in that it says basically "I'm gonna make an argument" instead of the actual argument.) One paragraph vs 50, times how many people?
Naturally, a paragraph can't capture the full original, but it can tell people whether the point is worthy enough to justify reading the whole thing.
It doesn't, but to support it with evidence and examples, it does. That is what makes an argument/position robust and harder to discredit/disprove.
Once someone knows what the argument is, they can decide whether it's something they've heard before, or already agree with, or want to know this or that point is supported. You don't get that from "he rips apart that argument, trust me".
It was me linking to my friends in my sign-off post on social network accounts and I was informing friends that if they wanted a summary of what I thought without having to contact me or listen to me rant for 30+ minutes, they could read a paper I agreed with or talk to me directly.
Have a good day :-)
Are you implying that the previous poster does not understand the issue if they chose not to state it in their own words? If not, this sentence seems out of place.
Given that "90% of everything is crap", people need a little more to go on than "Cool new argument that demolishes the nothing-to-hide point. The NSA hates it!"
Really? None of my Facebook friends are random people to me. Nor did I have thousands of people on my Facebook account. Please quote the exact number of friends I had on my profile, as well as the full-text of my sign-off message. I'll wait patiently.
> I linked my friends to his paper "I’ve Got Nothing To Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" [1] when I was closing down my Facebook and other social network sites;
Weird how my HN account is not closed and I never told anyone on HN that they should read it.
It's almost like I made a comment that was relevant to the author of the linked article (a paper by the same author that expands upon the limited scope of the article) that concerned something between my friends and I and included the link to the paper that I had also mentioned.
But thank you for being so invested and concerned about what happens between my friends and I. Have a good day :-)
If you really understand the core argument, what is so hard about giving a short summary?
Because this was never about me wanting or offering to give a summary, just an anecdote that the author of the article had also written something I had linked my friends to, nothing more. It was the responses that made me dig my heels in and be stubborn/pedantic.
1. Do you trust the government that will be in place 20 years from now? Most of those people are now teenagers. 2. We don't know what law changes may happen in the future. The data gathered can make you look like someone who will break one of those laws. Ex post facto (protection for someone who broke a law before it was in effect) has been overturned by the Supreme Court in specific cases in the past.
But even if the argument is not humans watching you, but computers, what happens when you say "terraces" on the phone and the computer algorithm transcribes it as "terrorists"? Or if you look up "bomb making", out of curiosity, using Google, and get permanently flagged as a potential suspect in every bombing from now on? You know you are not a criminal, but these systems make it so ridiculously easy to provide evidence that any one person committed any one crime.
And then there are those of us who live in Countries today with very oppressive laws or tyrants hunting down those who oppose them. Certainly there are those with something to hide somewhere in the world whom even "nothing to hide" adherents might sympathize with from their ivory tower, first-world perspective.
The sword of the Tyrant is forged and sharpened during times of peace. We would all be wise to not give our peaceful governments the tools and weapons of our children's destruction and enslavement.
What happens when we find out that the NSA was combing through data more thoroughly for democrats? IMHO this is 10x more of a 'threat to our freedom' than any terrorist.
When you enjoy privacy, you trust I don't know anything about you.
It feels like privacy advocates gloss over the actual cost of implementing good privacy. Given it is related to trust, and computed trust costs something, one would assume that privacy is something you should be willing to pay for. The correlation is that if someone wants to remove your ability to remain private, they should have to pay an equal or greater value to do so.
But, we still need a much shorter retort to use in conversation, than trying to discuss all of the points in that article.
Maybe:
"Well, if you think privacy is only for criminals, then you wouldn't mind if me and my friends, and your boss, all ride home with you tonight, & spend the night watching you sleep & all the stuff before that, right? Can your bathroom fit us all? If not, please pay some taxes to support that surveillance need. We'll be there every night from now on. See? Privacy is about "not being watched", not about "hiding crimes".
The other thing I'd add to this discussion is the question of what you're sharing with whom. The who of it all matters a great deal. Amazon collects a lot of data about my purchase history, for instance, and while the ramifications make me somewhat uncomfortable, I accept them. It's part of the shopping experience, and it's part of Amazon's business model. But take that purchase history out of context, and put it in the hands of someone looking for a very different set of inferences about me. A healthcare provider, for example, who can make startlingly precise inferences about my lifestyle and my likely state of health from my Amazon purchases. This scenario seems farfetched today. And I trust Amazon to be a reasonable steward of my information, and to maintain some sanctity over the context in which it's aggregated and analyzed. But I'm scattering plenty more breadcrumbs around the internet in my digital travels. I can only imagine the novel and ingenious ways they'll be used in the future -- for me, hopefully, but just as easily against me. It all depends on who's looking at my data, and for what purposes. Those people, and those purposes, might be very far removed from the people and purposes I'd originally envisioned when I'd shared my data. In most cases I can't really control that. That's what scares me.
Data context matters a great deal. So does the presumed aggregator of the data, and so do the presumed consumer(s) of that aggregation.
I think it's important to make this point to the general public, because the typical bogeymen (the NSA, Google, Facebook, etc.) don't really mean much to most people. When you conjure up the NSA, your average layperson will shrug and say "I have nothing to hide from them." Just mentioning the NSA brings up a fantastical frame of reference: a frame involving terrorists, leaks, Jack Bauer, and Edward Snowden. Most people, in that frame of reference, find it so far removed from their daily lives as to be almost comical. This breeds apathy. That apathy gets you the shrug and the dismissal. But conjure up a different frame of reference -- being denied health coverage because of purchase histories, or being turned down for a job because of image searches -- and people seem to get the idea.
We need to do a better job educating people about a) closer-to-home implications of privacy erosion, and b) examples of data, seemingly mundane, that can be aggregated to powerful effect. Yes, the big stuff matters. We should be making a big fuss about the NSA. But that's not the rhetorical starting point that's going to get Joe Sixpack to care. In some cases, it might even be counterproductive.
Welcome to the Kali Yuga! The age in which down is up.
However, power is a transferable abstract (like currency). If you frighten a population into paralysis, then you may appear to lose creativity, motivation, economic wealth, etc. However, those losses simply become the "cost" of "buying" different forms of power.
I don't think we can assume those are equal (or even of the same magnitude).
[1] I don't think people have the correct perception of how oppression works in a democracy. The line between the FBI trying to get MLK to commit suicide and the FBI imprisoning random middle-class white Americans is a lot bolder than people assume. I think the misunderstanding stems from a failure to appreciate the nature of oppressive government actions within a democracy. It's not like oppression of civil rights leaders in the 1950's and 1960's was the result of a self-contained entity within government, who could turn its attention to ordinary people at a whim. Instead, it was a classic case of the majority oppressing the minority, acting through government. Oppression of the majority requires an inversion of that power dynamic, and I think is harder to achieve than people assume.
This is all, of course, not to justify oppression of the minority. Rather, it's to point out that your typical person is quite justified in assuming the government has little reason to oppress him.
My concern is that excessive surveillance leads inevitably to excessive perceptions of culpability.
One does not need to be formally found guilty for a run-in with the law to lead to "temporary" detention and legal bills; and if you can't afford the legal bills, maybe you might be forced into plea bargaining and end up with a criminal record. Even if this scenario does not happen, a genuine harm to one's reputation as a result of "helping the police with their enquiries" often occurs, especially if one is a middle class corporate employee.
If you can't post bail you could be in jail for months on end, with no compensation if eventually found innocent.
Corporations can, and increasingly do, pursue actions against individuals which result in prison time being imposed, including for purely financial transgressions which bear an exceptionally strong resemblance to debtor's prison.
Corporations per se do not have the ability to imprison people, they petition the government to do so. Corporations may sue people in the courts, but if the suit does not result in a criminal conviction (as opposed to a civil one), it does not result in imprisonment.
The same law made violating a Website's TOU/TOS a felony -- which in the case of 17 Magazine meant that visiting its website if you were in fact 17 was a Federal crime.[2]
The reform to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which would have closed the loopholes under which Aaron Swartz was blocked by Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation.[3]
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Notes:
1. http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states-...
2. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/until-today-if-you-wer...
3. http://o.canada.com/technology/swart z-doc-director-oracle-and-larry-ellison-killed-aarons-law
That pretty much crystallises the core of the problem. It's never about what is right, wrong or proper - only what is approved to be more or less appropriate at the time. (A malleable thing in itself.)
Go give your upvotes to the original poster. Read the full comment while at it, too.
Otherwise, of course, I stand by the sentiment that one has a right to privacy and the 'nothing to hide' argument is spurious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television
It is a fact that the UK government has installed thousands of security cameras.
I can't think of a more concise argument than this.
Sometimes it's not about "you".
Of course! Controlling information is an integral part of all kinds of relationships. I didn't want to sound overly dramatic, I just thought I'd like to call things by their name.