Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide' (2011)

I've always liked using the social good argument from the same author's previous work[1].

"I don't mind giving up some privacy for safety. I've got nothing to hide."

"Well privacy isn't something you can just give up. It's a right given to society by our framers, not individuals. A smoothly functioning democracy depends on dissent, which requires privacy to allow alternate points of view to gain traction. So privacy is a social good, not a personal right, and if we reduce privacy, we are reducing our democracy. The Soviets didn't have privacy. Free countries must."

That last part is usually what does the trick.

[1]: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf

There's a building right down the street where they preached hatred for people like me not that long ago. I had something to hide (came out a year ago), and it was effectively a felony as recently as 2003.

If the US ever plunges into theocracy, I'm as good as dead. I don't hide it since I live in a relatively liberal and progressive part of a socially conservative region. I'm a little concerned about backlash from a favorable SCOTUS ruling, but it's too late to go back. Maybe the Presbyterian church next door will send someone over to help them adjust.

Anything you say today, however innocent, is potential "evidence" against you by a later government. "Your Honor, the accursed is on record, and admits, that he regularly voted for the Repugnicratic party. Why, he even admits to giving them money!"

Any personal fact collected and stored, however politically or criminally innocuous, is potentially retrievable by criminals breaching the storage system.

It doesn't matter how pure of heart today's collectors may be; if it's not observed or collected today then it can't be abused tomorrow.

Well, the hardest pulling argument I have for privacy is the following:

1. The government claims it must violate everyone's privacy in order to look for a few individuals, planning terrorist act X.

2. Though I wasn't involved in X before, I now go out of my way to avoid appearing sympathetic to X or involved in Y, which, while different from X, is adjacent to X, and therefore suspect in the eyes of the government who are hunting X. By a broad and ridiculous interpretation of X, X and Y come to be equal in the eyes of the government.

3. Discussions of or relating to X and Y are squelched sans privacy for fear of backlash; Z is next on the chopping block because it is adjacent to Y. At the start of this chain of events, discussion of Z was probably not quite mainstream, but it was certainly not equated to X, which was never acceptable by anyone. Thus, the slide from X to Z is complete, and the fallout from whatever is after Z can begin.

Dissent is treated like treason in the USA.

Anyone with an opinion that differs from the government has their speech targeted by reductions in privacy, and their speech will likely be chilled the more the government pushes the dissent-as-terrorism angle that they've shown to be keen for. They've already pulled "journalism", "privacy", "aiding or abetting by making youtube videos", "protesting", "whistleblowing" and "terrorism" into the same perverted continuum.

This article misses a huge thing everyone does have to hide, and that is the private information they have about their own family and friends.

My Facebook, my contacts list, my emails, my messages, my call history... all of these have private information about friends and family, and this private information should not be shared with others without the full consent of everyone involved.

"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."

Also see Martin Fowler's great essay "Privacy Protects Bothersome People":

http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

If you look over the course of history, what was considered "blasphemous," "treason", "illegal" and the like has changed A LOT.

Whenever I think of this topic I think of a simple comedy skit done as a commercial.

EX: We at the all seeing eye believe in transparency. From our naked policy (Queue lots of fat and somewhat blurry people), our computers (no cases) or our bathrooms (no stalls), we have no problems with you watching us watch you. (All Seeing Eye logo.)

PS: I can easily see a long list of really creapy skits in this vein.

EX2: At work (Moving all seeing eye coffie mugs) at play (kids tossing an all seeing eye ball) in sickness (All seeing stethoscope) and in health (pool lined with all seeing eyes) we are watching you (queue logo).

Privacy matters at this moment in time for few reasons. There is little risk to an individual's rights due to profiling based on available information (which is the result of no or limited privacy). That doesn't mean there is no risk, but for most of us the risk is negligible.

However, in the not-so-distant future it will be a much bigger deal. As data about our personal lives becomes more accessible and prolific, especially with the growth of IoT devices, and we get better at those big data profiling techniques we will see wider uses of profiling beyond nation security and marketing purposes. It is not hard to imagine a future where universities profile potential students based on available data and eliminate those deemed unfit (without ever looking at an application). Or employers doing similar things. Or insurance companies basing rates on profiling information.

Reasonable scenarios become easy to imagine with the end result that discrimination becomes commonplace. Discrimination for those that listen to a certain type of music, or use a certain type of grammar, or view certain websites. That is a dangerous future and we are heading down that path. We, as a society, need to figure out how to address this before it is a problem, and paramount to successfully thwarting that type of future is to ensure we maintain our privacy. That is why privacy matters.

Here's a potentially new argument to bring to the table, in addition to the usual: putting aside criminal or embarrassing issues, saying that you have nothing to hide is saying that your data is worth nothing.

Someone might find connections about you that you didn't know, like the fact that you are more willing to pay higher prices for the same product when you and your partner are trying to have a baby (just saying hypothetically). I don't think that information should be free. At the very least, I'd want to charge.

Someone might find out information about your children in indirect but legitimate ways. Perhaps your son is more likely to nag you to buy some product based on some controllable factor. I'd at least sell that kind of information for no less than $500. That's an iPad.

"I have nothing to hide" really means "I don't care, stop talking to me about it".

Nice article! One of the authors points was that people are not effected in their daily life through privacy problems (or at least that's what I read between the lines during that "dead bodies" metaphor).

So here's my idea: I'll place a warning in my email signature, that people should take care what they write to me because my email account is spied on and everything is recorded.

There are two points in this; first, it is quite accurate to reality, my (and everyone else's) email IS scanned for suspicious content for example. Second, it will shift the focus of people writing their text to this fact, that they are being monitored. This in turn should raise their awareness of the problem and put some effect on their life that they can easily perceive.

Few seem to be acknowledging the obvious:

It's a bad thing that records will exist documenting the sexual proclivities of those with their fingers on the nuclear launch button. When senators, presidents, and generals can be blackmailed, we've got a problem. The largest levers of power will be moved by the most trivial information.

The scenarios will range from invading countries to who gets that city building permit. All because someone is cheating on their spouse.

It's not strictly "government officials versus us." Government officials will also be spied on. That, imo, is the real problem. Even people who have nothing to hide don't want to live in a world like that.

The thing that bugs me most is the asymmetry. I don't think the location of every person everywhere being public is really that scary. But that means lots of things. For one, the spouse fleeing from the abusive partner - scary situation, but full tracking enables actually enforcing "stay this far away" court orders.

it's easier to rob banks when you know how long it will take for the police to get there, it's impossible to deny you were at the bank at the time.

I realize it's risky to tell our enemies where our generals, senators and president are, but if the accessibility isn't total the information pretty much instantly becomes a tool for tyranny.

Nothing to hide?

Hey, can you set a Gmail filter redirecting a copy of all your emails to my account? Do it, you have nothing to hide :)

Or better, just use a public Twitter account for all your communications so we all can see what you are doing.

I wish there was a gmail plugin that would make the users email publicly accessible, but read only. This would clearly test their "I have nothing to hide" argument.

I've seen this article several times now, and every time it has been equally impenetrable. I think one of the major flaws is that this sentence appears in the 10th paragraph:

"To evaluate the nothing-to-hide argument, we should begin by looking at how its adherents understand privacy"

Why do we only begin to evaluate the argument in the 10th paragraph?

This article has gravely serious implications, but it is needlessly long.

I'm not from the TL;DR crowd, but this is TL;NC (Not Cogent)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105485

Even more: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20Privacy%20Matters%20even...

I really like Moxie Marlinspike's Wired article on this [1]. Especially relevant to those of you in the US.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-t...

The only real solution is to build a culture where nobody (private our public) expects or gets privacy. There are lots of things people "would rather not share," that don't matter if we all know that people are people.

Besides, for capitalism to work, we need rational actors with /perfect information/.

I'm afraid that our political system is non-responsive to the mainstream opinion of the public. This privacy battle is unfortunately going to only change when something like all of Facebook's private messages end up on torrents

If you look at all the top privacy theorists, one of the standard arguments for privacy is that it protects minorities and other people whose opinions are currently unpopular for whatever reason. But if you look at a lot of the recent writing coming from the feminist movement, over the last year there have been a ton of folks arguing that privacy mainly protects men and those currently in power, and actually oppresses women and minorities. Not sure what's going on here, but it's certainly something worth keeping an eye on.

    Then the government might start monitoring some phone calls. 
    "It's just a few phone calls, nothing more." The government 
    might install more video cameras in public places. "So what?
    Some more cameras watching in a few more places. No big deal."

What I've learned from the privacy debate culture over the past years is that even amongst many privacy advocates the "So what?" mentality is prevalent. Their actions, not words, reveal this. While everyone rushes to use Threema, TextSecure, Telegram, OTR, GPG nearly no one bothers to check key fingerprints. That leads me to believe that the majority of people in this scene are using privacy technology as a means to simply feel better about themselves. To feel morally satisfied with themselves. It's not entirely dissimilar to the "support the troops" yellow ribbon, fight cancer "livestrong" wrist bands, or support the fight against AIDS red iPod. What we see is that people, even people that believe this is an important "fight", actually wind up with the same behavioural pattern of the "So what"'s. Both they and the "nothing to hide"'s reveal that this fight is actually not a fight at all but a window into the changing definitions of self and identity.

Privacy is a deeper topic than government surveillance. I suppose the article attempted to get slightly past that but not far enough imho. The change of this social contract has little to do with the NSA scandal. The focus on government intrusion of privacy is actually a distraction from the more existentialist issue at hand. That being we have and are changing.

The importance of secrecy is actually a great point from which to understand how the social contract of privacy is and will change. Philosopher George Simmel (born 1858) describes the importance of secrecy as:

    You are only an individual to the extent at which 
    you are NOT transparent. 

(shout out to philosopher Alice Lagaay for her work on the topic) But Simmel, other dead philosophers, dead poets or dead "founding fathers", were products of their time. In retrospect it is clear that, with the latency created by the physicality of their world, they lived in a transparency surplus. For this reason I argue that the debate surrounding this social contract lay not in post-privacy but in the understanding of post-existentialism (a relook at existentialist thought from the understanding of the networked-self -- identity increasingly built on relationships and extroversion).

The majority of people arguing "I have nothing to hide" aren't doing so because, as at one point this article argues, they feel the security value outweighs their concern for privacy. They are doing so because the networked self is creating very relevant non-security values to individuality. Something induced by the change from the physical self to self of the network. They are individuals that are focused on just living a better life, not some moralist agenda for a better life that used to be. If you hear "I have nothing to hide" and are inclined to enforce your moral understanding then you're missing the opportunity to understand these changes that are happening.

If you do want to argue it, regardless, the best argument I've heard is from the Privacy Extremists:

    Because I value many things, therefor I hide many things

http://shadowlife.cc/2012/11/the-treasure-which-is-privacy/

When you fight evil, you hide your moves so they don't move first. Evil will try by all means not letting you hide your moves by asking you, telling you, imposing you there is nothing to hide. Now you know where evil exactly is, and you hide even more, you mutate, you dissapear from the eyes of evil. That's the only way you fight them.

privacy is a myth