[FR] Je n'ai rien à cacher (I've got nothing to hide)
jenairienacacher.fr
jenairienacacher.fr
All the people I have met who resort to the "nothing to hide" paradigm were older than 65.these people don't have Facebook or smartphones, and they don't realize that their cars, insurance records and financial transactions are all being tracked. They do not understand the sensitivity of meta data or social graphs, nor do they care. They have their life in order, and surveillance doesn't take anything away from them. The fear of terrorism is a lot more substantial at their points in life.
I don't know about discourse in France - I can imagine that hell just broke loose after the recent attacks. Here in Germany, it's very much a generation problem. Those who care about civil rights and an active democracy are young, and young educated people are a minority. Old people are heavily catered to by the governing parties, and they all seem to love surveillance, most being lucky enough to never have experienced the downsides.
This fight feels a lot like the gay rights movement. Preconceptions are impossible to overcome, all you can do is wait for twenty years until you have a sizeable part of the population behind you, and then start an uproar. In the meantime, it doesn't help to, say, explain how small the aids propagation rate is. Nobody cares.
In Germany, or just in West Germany? Have people forgotten the Stasi already?
My most obvious guess is more rights to non humans, AI/Animals/Environment etc.
Got a strong viewpoint about a religion you don't like? You have something to hide.
Like to travel around the world and see new places, do new things? You have something to hide.
People need to understand the use-case for pervasive surveillance is not stopping terrorism. Its controlling civilization ..
EDIT: grammar.
By the way, you are German and think the older generation has no problem with surveillance? What about the experiences made in Eastern Germany? 1989 is not far into the past, you know.
And then there's the fact that the German people have been living in a society dominated by a non-sovereign intelligence agency since the end of WW2, a fact which won't change any time soon. The USA actually runs German intelligence agencies; if anything, Germany is the testing ground for new forms of societal control that the American TLA's can implement in their own realm. Slowly, over a period of time unnoticeable by the average bourgeoisie...
And though not that far, she's under that "65 y/o". But I won't give up repeating that argument that all that is wrong!
The conservative older people around me (e.g. family and their peers) all share the perspective I described, and that's all I have to qualify my statement. They are also all conservative or FDP voters. Weirdly enough, even those from Saxony or Thuringia didn't realize the Stasi analogy.
"Today no-one has their eyes on me, it's all just machines" was the most common sentiment I heard from them. Which might actually be a common stance ... across all generations.
I have seen this point being made several times now, that we simply don't deserve privacy or freedom from surveillance because we're using social media. In my opinion, this is wrong. Just because the data is technically available doesn't mean we're implicitly OK with large organizations gathering it all in one place in order to use it against us.
It feels really weird to tell you this, but I do believe that was indeed your point. The original statement was
"Those who care about civil rights and an active democracy are young"
to which you replied
"What makes you think the youth will be on your side? This generation is growing up with twitter and facebook as facts of life."
to which I replied
"I don't believe the use of social networks is an indicator that a person doesn't care about privacy."
to which you replied with a stream of insults. I admit I do have trouble seeing where you're coming from. If I misunderstood you in any way, I apologize.
Oppose or support me in what, exactly? And why is this somehow about me personally? I merely asserted that young people do care about privacy. I'm getting the feeling that you might be conflating what I said with what hengheng wrote.
> I think it's far more likely that they will come to some new conclusion that none of us old fogeys will understand
That's a valid point. However from observation, I would say "people who use $social_network obviously don't care about rights or privacy" is actually the old-fogey position. Teens sending each other stuff on Snapchat, for example, are most likely not OK with their streams being inspected from the outside. In fact, I do believe they even care which one of their friends gets what message.
Unlike many, I don't see lack of privacy as a compromise, nor do I see it as a security feature (i.e., against terrorism). Unlike many, I do understand the sensitivity of meta data and social graphs, and I deeply care about it.
It is obvious to me that transparency has all the benefits over privacy. It's a simpler way to think about and understand the world, it's easier to implement and maintain, and it's much more efficient.
Transparency is the way it should be. Privacy is just a band-aid, a patch, a set of arbitrary workarounds that in no way fights the underlying problems, if any there are. If anything, privacy only contributes to the increasing reliance on privacy that's expected of us. By keeping information secret, you encourage others to think it should be, and some people eventually are lead to believe that some things should inherently be secretive, without understanding why that is.
Do you really want to live in a world where you must constantly worry about your every steps, your every words, your every interactions? Do you believe it is sustainable to build systems that are 100 times more complex and inefficient as they should be just because you want to remain anonymous? Do you embrace the fact that people who are better manipulators/liers will always have an edge in a society that encourages privacy, since they can control what they decide to show the world? Do you realize that a system that's based on the assumption that secrets are kept secrets is much more fragile than one that's not, as secrets are becoming increasingly more difficult to keep? Do you not realize how much value and opportunities we miss now that people were tricked into believing that privacy is necessary? Bitcoin, Google Glass, geo-tracking anything, health record analysis, etc.
I don't want to hide anymore. I don't want to compete with liers, or be tricked by them. I don't want to password-protect all the things. I don't want to browse behind 7 proxies. I don't want to be explicit about everything that could be implicitly inferred through tracking. I don't want to keep secrets anymore.
Fortunately, I soon won't have to. Transparency will thrive, and privacy will die. My only worry is, how far and deep will people like you go into making society rely on and expect privacy. The deeper you go, the more brutal the transition will be the day the choice is no longer yours.
That said, I don't expect our privacy will last, either. Like you said, efficiency - the current economic fetish - will be used as an excuse to kill it soon enough. For some, that is. Like free markets, transparency will be forced on the poor and avoided by the rich, eliminating most of the potential benefits it could have brought.
Citizens of oppressive governments are in very real danger if they have no privacy. When the secret police are listening in to everything you say and ready to whisk you away at whim, there can be no dissent nor hope of reform.
Gay children of highly conservative parents are in very real danger if they have no privacy. Suicide rates in that and similar demographics are disturbingly high, and today many get through simply by hiding their identity until they're out on their own. That's not an option in your world.
Anyone with minority views on contentious issues relative to their neighbors or co-workers is at risk if they have no privacy. Sometimes the most effective solution when you've got to get along with other people is just to stay silent. (I live in a small, rural town, but my values are closer to those of my friends in places like San Francisco. A whole lot of people here would be suspicious or hostile if they knew how much our worldviews differ.)
I could go on. But in general, the people who most need privacy are the ones who are most different from the people around them. It's much easier to set privacy aside when you're surrounded by people who are already happy to accept you for who you are. Maybe there's another stable society to be found with no privacy at all, as you envision, but the road from here to there is steep, and rough, and has dizzying cliffs on either side.
Privacy doesn't make the world perfect, but neither would transparency.
I hate to accuse anyone of privileged naivety, but if you believe that the elimination of privacy would be a net improvement for the world, then you must also:
- be in a position of social power, and confident in
your ability to remain there, or
- hold no important opinions that diverge from the
orthodoxy or the power structure that upholds it
AND
- have no knowledge of the history of marginalized
groups, the reasons for their marginalization, or
the repercussions thereof, or
- believe we already live in, or are moving inexorably
toward, a eutopian global kumbaya where everyone just
gets along, because enlightenment
The real lesson from history seems to be that information is power and secret information even more. Elites (what you describe as those with social power) have used their secrets to repress everyone else for millennia (and likely longer than that).
It is important to have the right and possibility to be anonymous
in a world where that right and possibility is not needed. Because
as soon as they are needed, they become vital to be used.
This why I call the world you're describing by saying: Transparency will thrive, and privacy will die. My only worry is, how far and deep will people like you go into making society rely on and expect privacy is nothing more than an utopia.
What the French have done to Africa, and what they continue to do to Africa - which should be one of the richest continents on Earth, in terms of world economy - is definitely something that has to be hidden from the French public, or else they wouldn't stand one minute more of their ruling elite lying to them.
Former French colonies are, as of today, being heavily repressed by France. This fact needs to continue to be hidden, lest the world wake up to the repression and demand that the French people do something effective about it. Until then, terrorism is to be expected. You can't rule as an imperial power and not expect blowback; people want to be free to live their lives un-repressed.
EDIT: Read this, and then re-consider your downvote: http://thisisafrica.me/france-loots-former-colonies/
Fact is, the Western nations have a lot of responsibility for imperial machinations in the world, and while the French people - as well as those of us in other Western nations - may not have anything to hide, we certainly have a LOT that must be revealed to us in order to understand just why people are willing to give their lives to disrupt Western imperialism. Its not all religion; mostly, its economic and human rights violations on the part of the Western powers, which motivates such heinous response.
- and as the previous comment chain says, it looks very bogus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearstream_affair
I would personally be quite content to see more evidence presented in the public sphere and world court. When/if it happens, let us pick up the thread ..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876429
explains in quite a lot of detail how it walks like bogus and talks like bogus. It makes extraordinary claims which cannot be backed up, and which are conflicting with realistic assessment of what is possible (for instance, that France would be ripping off an amount of money that equals to its annual state budget, without that money showing up anywhere.)
As for the money not showing up anywhere, its quite clear that the French secret services are involved in covering up the transactions - this is one of their key tasks, after all.
I have nothing to hide. In fact yes, and so do you.
-----
--> May I ask for your computer, e-mail and Facebook password? Promise, I won't do anything bad, only read.
How would you dare to answer no? If you have nothing to hide, you cannot make the distinction in what you disclose publicly, and what may bother you a little bit more. As soon as you impose a barrier, you have something to hide (and that's normal!).
The rest of us, human beings, are distinguished between each other because we all have a private life, an intimacy that we do not reveal to all. -----
If all you want to do is read the information I make public, send a friend request like a normal person.
You have no idea what the world will be like 10 years from now.
The French nationals that dutifully filled out their 1930s census form had nothing to hide, until IBM rolled into town and started doing 1940s Big Data on it, then lots of people wanted to hide.
One of the slide gives a false feeling of equality between two quotes, one by Brice hortefeux and one by Eric schmidt on privacy.
The first one is about surveillance cameras put in public streets by an elected representative of the people (a mayor).
The other is about scanning private conversations by a private company who only deals with shareholders.
I don't think calling everything "a society of surveillance" helps to finely tune the measures that we'll have to put in place to improve security in a not too radical way.
He later makes the point that even measures taken by governments could be completely misused by fascists regime, which is true. But then the problem is maintaining a democratic power, and a fair legal system.
And that problem existed with disastrous consequences far before the internet was created.
Don't people choose to trust Google with their data, in the same way they delegate their power to the mayor?
> He later makes the point that even measures taken by governments could be completely misused by fascists regime, which is true. But then the problem is maintaining a democratic power, and a fair legal system.
What are you getting at with that?
The fact is, large amounts of processing power, an incredible amount of data collected (in a way that would not have been possible in a pre-Internet era), and little accountability by design are an extremely dangerous combination. You do not even need to go back to the Vichy era for that. Both Hoover and the Gaullist SAC people would have been delighted to have such information at their disposal...
Well, that if a country becomes non democratic to the point where surveillance cameras or email snooping becomes a problem, then there would probably be a lot of bigger problems to deal with in the first place (such as people with gun in the street that can arrest you physically for no reason).
In my case, they're preaching to the choir, but if I was actually one of the people they were trying to convince, it'd fail completely.
This mentality fires back quickly and is usually a trait of someone who haven't thought it through yet.
Most people think they have their body to hide. Showing them that it isn't so might make a difference.
However, unless the article is making some absurd metaphor, the points above stand.
https://lite5.framapad.org/p/nothing-to-hide
please improve it, and why not make an igotnothingtohide website ;-)
which redirects to the pad. Once we got a nice and readable translation, I'll put a nicer page over there. Don't hesitate to ping me on twitter @guyzmo, or IRC (freenode, zmo).