
I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (2014) - rahuldottech
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
======
McDev
_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._

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#2015](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#2015)

~~~
zsmizzle
Also, one of the hardest-hitting quotes from his book, Permanent Record:

 _" There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s
freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to
surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or
under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have
something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you
have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to
hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history,
financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including
yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their
religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually
as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing
to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech
because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the
press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of
religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the
freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.
Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t
mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your
neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my
phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a
fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling."_

― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, p. 208

[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/71198843-permanent-
rec...](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/71198843-permanent-record)

~~~
throw0101a
Adding to that: by giving up your freedom (of _X_ ) you may be giving it up
for those around you. We interact with people and information about others can
be gleaned by what we do.

Privacy-conscious people may not use Gmail because they don't like what Google
is doing, but if everyone you communicate with has an @gmail.com address,
you're being 'compromised' every time you send a message to them.

------
numlocked
Doesn’t look like many are reading the actual article. It sets up the “nothing
to hide” argument as the following, which is quite a bit more difficult to
rebut:

“ Therefore, in a more compelling form than is often expressed in popular
discourse, the nothing to hide argument proceeds as follows: The NSA
surveillance, data mining, or other government information- gathering programs
will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few
government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very
limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be
threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Only those who are engaged
in illegal activities have a reason to hide this information. Although there
may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing
to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy.
Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing
terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate
privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of
information.

Cast in this manner, the nothing to hide argument is a formidable one.”

~~~
BLKNSLVR
I'd like to turn the conversation around and question the prioritization of
surveillance of the people over the transparency of politicians'
communications, sources of funding, who they're meeting with and all such
related activities they perform in a role servicing and paid for by the
public.

Only once this is addressed should we move down the priority list to "blanket
communication and behavioural surveillance of the citizenry."

The potential for harm to a country and it's citizens caused by political
decisions is exponentially greater than any act by an individual or group with
no political power. (and whilst this point is arguable and weighted with
emotion, this includes 9/11).

~~~
aphextim
>Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing
terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate
privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of
information.

No thank you, I'd give up my privacy if it could help prevent heart attacks,
cancer or maybe even automobile crashes but terrorism compared to the above
pale in comparison when you consider the number of deaths. Literally giving up
one of the fundamentals the country was founded on for something so minor is
clearly a reach of power for the government to control the population under
the guise of keeping them secure.

[https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-
death-i...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-
vs.-media-coverage.png)

[https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism](https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism)

------
rahuldottech
A link to direct PDF:
[https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf](https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf)

@dang you might want to edit the URL to this

------
vezycash
"Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will
find enough in them to hang him."

~~~
XorNot
This does not make the point you're thinking it does.

~~~
jacquesm
How do you know what he is thinking?

~~~
coldtea
Context of course.

Since he posted it in this thread, he should obviously thinks it makes a point
relevant to privacy.

But the quote is not about privacy. "Give me six lines" just means that
anything said/written by someone could be misconstrued against them, not just
their private communications.

(Of course it would also apply to things communicated in private, and perhaps
even more so since one would say even more damning things there. But it's not
meant to be a warning about them, but about how anyone can something something
that can be used against them, privately or not).

~~~
vezycash
>But it's not meant to be a warning about [private communication], but about
how anyone can something something that can be used against them, privately or
not

Okay, the internet was created for military communications. So, with your
logic, you should have a problem with it being used to power eCommerce,
pornography, YouTube, Facebook and hacker news.

This ain't literature class.

~~~
coldtea
> _Okay, the internet was created for military communications. So, with your
> logic, you should have a problem with it being used to power eCommerce,
> pornography, YouTube, Facebook and hacker news._

Not with "my logic", but with the logic of some strawman, who claimed
something really unrelated to my point.

I didn't say that "nothing can't be used outside of its original stated
purpose".

I said that a specific quote about how anybody can find some damning thing in
what others have wrote/said to attack them with, is not the same as a quote
about privacy.

That is, it's intented message not:

"It's good to keep your writings/letters/etc private because else someone
might find stuff in them to use against you"

but:

"I -as a skilled manipulator- can take any random stuff wrote/said by even the
most innocent man and it against them to make them appear guilty".

~~~
vezycash
>I said that a specific quote about how anybody can FIND some damning thing in
what others have wrote/said to attack them with, is not the same as a quote
about privacy

The act of FINDING anything one has said/written is privacy related.

>I -as a skilled manipulator- can take any random stuff wrote/said by even the
most innocent man and it against them to make them appear guilty".

Good point. Let's put the quote in context. Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret
police is where this quote supposedly originated. They had a country-wide spy
network to monitor what people said.

Data manipulation can't happen without data. Without the collection and
storing of conversations, breaking into people's homes, intercepting
mails/telephone/telegraph correspondence, no manipulation of the "words" could
have happened.

The point is - A skilled manipulator won't find anything to hang me unless
he's invading my privacy in the first place. (Assuming I don't give public
speeches or write publicly)

~~~
coldtea
> _Gestapo, Nazi Germany 's secret police is where this quote supposedly
> originated. They had a country-wide spy network to monitor what people
> said._

The quote is attributed to cardinal Richelieu, and whether it's his or not,
exists for at least 2 centuries, so before the Gestapo and modern
surveillance.

> _Data manipulation can 't happen without data._

Which is neither here, nor there. I agree that privacy is important, and that
surveillance offers all kinds of opportunities for that.

My point is that the quote wasn't intended originally as a comment on that,
and it is out of place related to that, because it intends to emphasize the
inverse: you don't need "data", just any 6 lines will do.

> _The point is - A skilled manipulator won 't find anything to hang me unless
> he's invading my privacy in the first place._

That's a point one can make. It might even be a point I agree with.

It's not however the point the quote was making. And it's only that which I'm
pointing here, not the merits or not of privacy/surveillance.

The quote was making the inverse point: "Who cares for data and deep secrets,
and notebooks, and spying, and so on. I just need any old 6 lines from someone
and can have them hanged".

Might be too arrogant for Richelieu (or whoever said it) to think so. Might
not even be realistic. But even metaphorically, it's purpose was to convey:

"Anything someone says can be used and misconstrued against them".

------
leghifla
This "nothing to hide" discussions always remind me of this great essay "We
should all have something to hide": [https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-
have-something-to-hide/](https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-
to-hide/)

------
credit_guy
I find this article underwhelming. It does not really build a strong case. I
personally, am person about as interesting or uninteresting as a few billion
other people in the world, or as a few hundred million people in the United
States. Privacy advocates tend to paint a picture like in the movies
"Conspiracy Theory" or "Enemy of the State": if you find yourself in the
crosshairs of the state, you're in trouble. Well, here's the thing: I'm not
Mel Gibson, and I'm not Will Smith. The chance of the state finding my person
interesting is fairly reduced. If someone wants to make my life miserable,
there are probably a few hundred guys working for Google who can read my every
email on my gmail account, and who can probably even impersonate me on the
internet. There are scores of other tech guys working in some bank who can see
my every bank transaction, or every credit card payment, or engineers at
Amazon who can see the history of my purchases. Pretty much only those who
don't want can't find my physical address, or my phone number, or other
things. Given all that, the fact that the NSA can do all these things too,
well I, for one, am not losing a lot of sleep over this.

------
Merrill
It's ironic that the "global electronic village" turns out to be just like a
real village -- there's very little privacy.

------
lazyguy2
The most important thing I've learned from watching Cia and FBI shills being
interviewed on CNBC is that in order to preserve our rights we must first be
willing to surrender them.

Security and privacy are not diametrically opposed concepts. They are directly
dependent on one another. You can't have one without the other.

~~~
natch
This makes no sense. Both the paragraphs and the sentences contradict each
other while repeating cliches from past discussions on this topic. It reads
like a markov bot account. You might want to explain what you mean better.

------
CryptoPunk
_According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy
unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has
no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private._

This is a surprisingly common sentiment in HN when it relates to financial
privacy.

Laws that criminalize financial privacy, aka KYC/AML laws, are justified with
precisely this "nothing to hide" argument geared to money laundering and other
financial crimes, and said laws are quite popular with the tech
intelligentsia.

------
mkagenius
Conclusion from the pdf:

Whether explicit or not, conceptions of privacy underpin nearly every argument
made about privacy, even the common quip “I’ve got nothing to hide.” As I have
sought to demonstrate in this essay, understanding privacy as a pluralistic
conception reveals that we are often talking past each other when discussing
privacy issues. By focusing more specifically on the related problems under
the rubric of “privacy,” we can better address each problem rather than ignore
or conflate them. The “nothing to hide” argument speaks to some problems, but
not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of
privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often
raised in government surveillance and data mining programs. When engaged with
directly, the “nothing to hide” argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate
to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the
plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use
beyond surveillance and disclosure, the “nothing to hide” argument, in the
end, has nothing to say.

------
axilmar
"Nothing to hide" does not mean "nothing private". "Nothing to hide" means "no
unlawful action". It's another thing alltogether from having private things.

~~~
taneq
The way I heard it expressed was "there's a difference between secrecy and
privacy; you know exactly what I'm doing in the bathroom but I still don't
want you watching."

------
karimmaassen
The right to privacy is the right to decide what you want to share or not.

~~~
Koshkin
And _with whom_.

------
yiyus
In my opinion the nothing to hide argument is valid in a personal basis, but
not in a policy making basis. I am against the surveillance of citizens in the
name of security, and I actively support the EFF in their attempts to stop it,
but I do not have a sticker covering my webcam because if someone at NSA is
spending his afternoons watching me working, and maybe putting the finger in
my nose from time to time, I sincerely don't care.

~~~
natch
Limiting the conversation to what is seen on a webcam doesn’t come close to
covering the scope of what could happen.

Let’s say your screen is captured as well. And sometimes that screen will
contain personal and private information of friends and family who might care.

It is not your call to decide for them whether their information should be put
at risk or not by an organization that has proved itself capable of leaking
like a sieve.

You could argue that your devices contain no names of friends or pictures or
contact info or messages of any sort with anyone. OK, but that would be pretty
unusual.

Saying you don’t care is like driving drunk on an empty road with passengers
in the car. You may not care about whether you die, but you have passengers.
Your caring about yourself or not isn’t the issue.

~~~
yiyus
I think you misunderstood my comment (being honest, it was not very well
redacted). I do not disagree with anything you said at all, on the contrary.
What I mean is precisely that a lack of personal reasons to keep your privacy
is not a good reason to not push for privacy policies. I am totally against
screen capturing, as I am against surveillance using laptop cameras or phone
microphones, or public cameras capturing my face.

However, even although I care about this and actively oppose these practices,
I don't cover my face when I live my home, for example, and I don't think
(some people may disagree) that I should. Of course, once this affect more
people, it is not my choice to not care, and I will do everything possible to
keep other people privacy.

------
HNLurker2
Exactly the opposite nihilistic enough that I am waiting to be caught and
thrown in prison (deep web sins)

------
teyc
Sure you have: your SSN, your password, your mother's maiden name, you first
pet's name, your relationship with your wife/kids/mother. It's no one else's
business.

------
jeffdavis
"I have done nothing wrong" => "I have nothing to hide" iff everyone is good
and always will be good in the future and never punish me unless I do
something wrong.

~~~
natch
And iff the definition of good will never change.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
A problematic assumption, as we're already seeing with the ongoing stream of
old-Twitter-post scandals.

------
vaporland
Won't open PDF without me signing up. :-(

~~~
rahuldottech
Direct link to PDF:
[https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf](https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~greenie/privacy/solove.pdf)

------
fouc
Edit: oops, can't link directly to pdf :)

~~~
llacb47
Nope

------
headsoup
If I am to be surveilled anyway, perhaps they can ensure my protection from
threats to my privacy?

After all I assume they're doing all this for our protection, not to generate
crimes?

------
WarOnPrivacy
I've got nothing to show, therefore no reason to be surveilled.

~~~
fouc
saying is showing, showing is saying. You've got nothing to say?

------
Mathnerd314
tl;dr NSA surveillance _could_ have chilling effects (no evidence either way)
and the author has concerns about oversight and accountability.

Pretty unconvincing IMO. The real issue is selective enforcement, e.g. cops
who bomb a house to smithereens in pursuit of a suspect but then have
sovereign immunity so don't have any consequences. And similarly city
officials tend to throw the book of regulations at people they don't like.

~~~
peteradio
I agree, the information that can be gathered and probably has been gathered
would constitute an invalid search/seizure for that information to have been
got only a few decades ago. Now the information is there for the taking and so
whatever personal power struggle with the government is way under gunned. Any
one can be squashed at the whim. And ultimately there needs to be a strong
press/codes to air/catch the unjust application of the power.

