
“How do you talk to 'I have nothing to hide' people?” - kick
https://lobste.rs/s/6yrndd/how_do_you_talk_i_have_nothing_hide_people
======
flashman
Ask them to unlock their phone and hand it over. Reassure them they can watch
everything you do with it and that you won't use it to impersonate them, and
if they want you to stop, the safe word is "I have something to hide."

~~~
ScottFree
This. Throwing facts and figures at them won't work. You have to make them
feel it. I usually ask them if they have any problem with revenge porn sites.

------
AnimalMuppet
First, you have things to hide. Your bank account number, at a minimum. I'm
pretty sure that everyone understands that one as soon as you say it. You _don
't_ want your bank account access information to be general knowledge.

Second, if you have a window that someone can look through (the feds, say),
someone else can also look through it (criminals, say). What one can do,
someone else can do.

I think most people can grasp those two points. (For the second, you may need
to give some examples of NSA-only stuff that became generally available.) But
the combination of those two points leads them to "I have things I need to
hide, and I can't let even the government peek."

~~~
Faaak
FYI, in europe, the bank account number (IBAN) is public and you can't do
anything with it except wire money to it

~~~
krageon
This is wrong, and has in fact always been wrong (even in the old system you
could use a bank acc number, an address and a name to take money from an
account). You can take money out of bank accounts with just IBAN and a name
(though even the requirement for a name is spurious). Of course there are
legal repercussions and usually the bank refunds your money - but that's when
it is already too late.

The banking system you are talking about is built entirely on trust.

~~~
gnnnni
Interesting, do you have any source for that? How would do that using only
IBAN and a name (i.e. without faking a signature, having the PIN number, a
compromised device etc.)

~~~
nloomans
It's called Direct Debit:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_debit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_debit)

------
osazuwa
"Then why don't you live stream yourself pooping? Why don't you let people
walk into your house and look around, just out of curiosity?" Tell them their
privacy belongs to them. When they let someone shift the question from "what
do I want you to see" to "what have I got to hide", they cede power to that
someone. They might not care about that power now, but when they end up
caring, it will be too late.

------
Melting_Harps
You don't, that's a waste of time for anyone actually proficient in OPSEC.

After years of advocating for privacy on multiple fronts (amateur-enthusiast
to professional) I realize that most people are not capable of being trusted
to protect themselves from even the most basic threat vectors, and that
convenience is the biggest priority in their calculus, thus it will never
occur to them why things like PgP encryption and cryptocurency is necessary
until its too late.

At which point they're a potential customer, so why am I going to reduce my
Market share?

------
stevenicr
I say that's fine, you don't have to hide anything. Most people have things
they would like to keep private however.

Some older folks may not have nudes on thier phone or porn habits to hide..
but most younger folks have nudes of themselves and people they know or have
known , or at least something 'incriminating' \- almost nude, drinking,
whatever..

and I go to explain how hundreds or thousands of engineer-nerds have access to
their daughter's pics and videos, chat logs and history of wives and
husbands..

we're given permission by them to collate this info and combine it shopping
habits, cc and debit purchases. We can know when they are pregnant before
anyone else. We have systems that auto-copy their pics if they are 80% or more
nude and saved on a one-drive system (do all win 10 systems have that?) and
sends those nudes and nearly nudes for humans to inspect them,

call your bank in the morning and ask them if they auto-opted-you-in for
sharing all the purchasing data from your debit card.

Last I checked if you wanted to buy pics of their daughter they were around
$10 for license and commercial use.

See you may not have anything to hide.. but because you use these privacy
destroying services the network effects of family / friends also use that..
you are creating this problem for others.

So just grab a few phones from girls in your family and copy all the pics and
browser history from all their apps - and give copies to the neighbors.. cuz
the girls in your fam are already sharing them with thousands of other people
they don't know.. it's just they likely did not read of understand the
permissions they gave, so they have no idea how many engineer-nerds are
looking at their pics, videos, and purchase history.

Think I'm missing a few things on this rant, need to dig up my old comments on
this and blog it or something I guess.

------
lol_jono
Ask them if they close and lock the door when they go to the bathroom. If they
say yes, ask them why.

~~~
warlog
There's a difference between privacy and secret. Don't conflate them!

~h.t. Cory Doctorow

------
SamPatt
Just say "I have something to hide. Do you believe I should be able to?"

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anonsivalley652
There's two facets to this: one is about privacy and the other is a naïveté
about the nature of people with power and how the weak fail to anticipate the
powerful's capabilities.

First: _Okay, they give me all of your passwords, banking PINs, a list of all
of your sexual proclivities, all of your browser histories including porn, and
agree to live in a glass house that 's live-streamed 24x7 to the internet._

Second: The weak rarely realize the scope of capabilities the powerful can
lord over them. One obvious capability is powerful can direct district
attorneys/crown prosecutors to look for evidence that a target has committed a
crime. One common attack is over-prosecution for technical infractions that
the weak volunteer; that this, giving too much information combined with tens
of thousands of arcane laws setup the victim for attack. For more on this
topic, there's a good book called _Three Felonies a Day._ Furthermore,
sometimes the powerful just make up "crimes" to justify harsh punishments:
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Fred Hampton and Leonard Peltier are just a
few that come to mind. (Daniel Ellsberg's freedom is a miracle.) Furthermore,
powerful people have powerful friends who have even more capabilities at their
disposal. It's not some sort of grand, organized conspiracy theory, it's human
nature that people of similar interests help others in a similar station and
those at the top have many more sacrificial Random Jobs.

------
atoav
They usually have something to hide, so make a jokenthat proofs this (ask them
to let you scroll through their picture gallery etc). And then when they feel
uncomfortable change to a more serious tone and tell them how information
translates to power. It is not the other person that is the problem — it is a
problem when this information is abused by megacorps and governments.

So in a very old school way privacy for citizens is about division of power
and restoring symmetry. If your government or a company knoes everything about
you while you are only allowed to know the glossy salespicture version of
things, something is off.

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lern_too_spel
In what context is the question of whether somebody has anything to hide even
relevant? It's like asking how to convince somebody that unicorns aren't real.
Very few people believe unicorns are real and the fact that those few people
believe unicorns are real is of little consequence. The real question is do
you trust the law to keep the things you want hidden hidden and to make the
secrets of criminals that you don't want hidden available to law enforcement
officials. For most people in the United States, that's a "Yes."

------
MarvinYork
I tell them that they will pay more for a plane ticket than others if they
don't hide their Apple products or their profession. Suddenly they understand
that there IS something to hide...

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WheelsAtLarge
We all have something that we don't want other people to know or see. Ask them
why they wear clothing every day. And close the door when they are in the
restroom.

Also, point them to all the damage the Sony hack did. There was nothing
illegal in the emails and I'm sure many thought they had nothing to hide. But
the hacking of the email sure made their lives hell.

Lastly, talk to them about all the identity theft fraud that's constantly in
the news.

You may be able to trust some people with some of your info. but you can't
trust anyone but yourself with all your info.

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redis_mlc
These three questions work pretty well:

1\. If you called a lawyer, would you expect privacy?

2\. Do you want naked fotos of your family on the Internet?

3\. Did you tell your co-workers/boss who you voted for?

The real zinger is:

Do you know the police track your vehicle from home to work and back? (It's
been reported the US government flies privately-registered surveillance
aircraft over large US cities in a racetrack-pattern and use time-lapse photos
to track vehicles.)

------
u801e
You could frame the right of privacy in different terms such as encryption is
a type of munition to protect your information from a tyrannical government.
This closely matches the typical argument people use for second amendment
rights.

There are also other ways to frame the premise:

If you have nothing to say, then why do you need the freedom of speech?

If you have nothing to defend, then why do you need the right to bear arms?

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grok22
Maybe they are just saying "I have nothing to hide from the _government_ "?
This might be true for most law-abiding citizens in the US atleast where there
is a reasonable rule of law (as compared to many other parts of the world!).

~~~
woutr_be
That's what that phrase means, people saying "hand over your phone" or "leave
the door unlocked" or "livestream your life" completely missed the point,
which doesn't even resonate with what the article was referring to.

The articles talked about trading privacy for convenience and comfort. All the
"counter arguments" people listed have nothing to do with those two.

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milkytron
If they're serious, I'll give them the points made in the comments on the
page.

If they aren't serious or don't care about the answer, I ask them to leave the
door open next time they poop.

------
pasabagi
Well, one thing is that people don't know the things they might have to hide.
Many of the jews murdered in the Holocaust were basically unaware they were
even jews, before they started to be persecuted for it. Hannah Arendt was one
such case.

Unfortunately, this is very common in history. You would never have known that
buying a noble title in Bourbon france would lead to the guilotine, nor that
being a committed communist would probably get you shot under Stalin. These
things are very unpredictable. Being German in early-20th century Montana was
dangerous. Being black in 1700's Haiti was, so long as you were free,
absolutely not a problem - until it suddenly was.

There are countless examples like this. Nobody knows what's coming next.

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8jef
Saying you have nothing to hide is not acceptable, it's (for the most part) a
submissive declaration. If you accept open and unsupervised scrutiny on things
that are private by nature, you not only give up parts of your basic freedom,
you also give out something extremely valuable, for free. This is totally
unacceptable in a capitalist system. You should be ashamed, you commies.

