
Why Privacy Matters Even If “You Have Nothing to Hide” - LinuxBender
https://write.privacytools.io/privacy-simplified/why-privacy-matters-even-if-you-have-nothing-to-hide
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Jon_Lowtek
Lack of respect for the human right to privacy by governments and corporations
will lead to mass surveillance, gamified control and microtargeted propaganda.

Every one of these is dangerous, but gamified control is by far the worst of
these, as it directly attacks the concept of equality which many human rights
are fundamentally based on. "Equal access to public service"? Well sure you
_had the chance_ to have a good enough score to be allowed in this part of
town. It is your own fault that you are a bad human. Giving up privacy will
place governance in the hand of unthinking uncaring algorithms. If you the
think the human bureaucrats were bad, wait until you experience the automated
ones. But even worse: these three mechanisms empower authoritarianism and are
easily abused to reinforce power of a ruling caste.

Modern technology makes it easier to ignore the basic human right to privacy
than to respect it. I therefor would not compare privacy to free speech, like
Snowden does. Free speech is easy. In my opinion it is far more reasonable to
compare privacy to the right to a fair trial: having fair trials is
significantly harder than despotism. And in a similar way, most people care
very little about fairness in court, unless they are directly impaired, and
many are willing to throw it away if they believe some evil is using it to
hide from justice.

------
Silhouette
A simpler argument:

It is unlikely that you truly have nothing to hide, but it is even more
unlikely that every single person who has any influence over your life has
nothing to hide. Protecting their privacy prevents exploitation that could
hurt you too.

~~~
Jon_Lowtek
This is a wonderful rhetoric, a nice example of eristic dialectic. I love it.
It avoids implying the person argued with has a taint, which would make them
defensive, but instead allows them to pick a straw man from their monkey-
sphere and create a vague threat against themselves where the best defense is
agreeing with the pro-privacy argumentation. There is one way out: "everyone i
know is a saint, and if someone is not, i am a saint and would rather get
smeared for acquaintance than protect the devil." but it is unlikely any human
will react in this way, because it is almost never true.

However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works emotionally:
It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something evil, which is
the primary attack vector against this basic human right and should be
refuted, not reiterated.

Privacy is not about hiding vileness, it was (19th/20th century) about not
allowing a totalitarian government to read your private correspondence in
search for what they consider dissident opinions. Many people are very lucky
that they find this hard to grasp.

Privacy has changed, it had to change because of the "data is the new oil"
paradigm. 21st century privacy is _your right to choose who can process your
data for what._ Example: You would never agree that your data is processed by
an organization with the purpose of changing your opinion to theirs without
ever telling you they are engaging you at all. Yet that is happening, it is
called microtargeting.

~~~
coldtea
> _However your argument is fundamentally flawed, even if it works
> emotionally: It accepts the narrative that privacy is about hiding something
> evil, which is the primary attack vector against this basic human right and
> should be refuted, not reiterated._

Such a distinction doesn't matter much.

Evil is in the eye of the beholder. E.g. for Southern racists in the 50s, the
fact that one supported and funded black rights would seem "evil" as well.

As long as what X (= you or someone you know) said or did appears evil to
third parties (government, society at large, their boss, private interests,
etc), and leaking this could have negative consequences against X, that's
enough to justify the argument made.

Whether the thing is actually evil or good is not really relevant (that
implies some fixed moral order for eternity and for everybody within a certain
time).

~~~
Jon_Lowtek
I like your explanations of "right to hide something". Thank you.

Here in germany the "nothing to hide" argument is mostly used by the
spokespeople of the ministry of state security with an implication of crime as
defined by the law as written. But let's not focus on the finer points of
morality. More important: even if we go from "right to hide some thing evil"
to "right to hide some thing" we are not even close to privacy. Because
privacy is not about hiding some information about oneself, it is about the
right to have some level control about personal information.

A level at which almost everyone suddenly understands privacy is sexuality: no
matter if you want to keep your sexuality hidden or not, no matter if you
publish on pornhub or not, privacy is the right to not be filmed in your
bedroom without your consent. Privacy is not about hiding.

------
biolurker1
The argument is incorrect. I may want to say something in the future but I may
not want to hide something because one is legal and other is illegal unless
there is a dictatorship.

~~~
coldtea
> _but I may not want to hide something because one is legal and other is
> illegal unless there is a dictatorship._

There's no democracy vs dictatorship binary. It's a spectrum.

There are all kinds of things that are legal but the public sentiment is
against them, so you want to hide them to protect your social life/career/etc.
Being gay in the 70s was one of them. Or a communist sympathizer in the
McCarthy era. Many things in 2020 too from both the left and right side (e.g.
it's not like the right wingers are safe. For example, news that he donated
against a popular progressive cause cost someone his CEO position at a major
tech company -- and that's despite the fact that the majority of his state
voted in the same vein).

There all also things that are nominally legal but the government/law/local
authorities will hold against you in a democracy. Being a peaceful human
rights activist would still get you a large folder at the FBI, and in Southern
towns could get you harassed by the police.

There are also things you want to keep hidden because you just don't want them
public, like your sexual preferences of BDSM or "golden showers", your sex
tapes with your partners, your gossip mails or chat against a colleague or
boss with a third party, and so on.

If you are in any position of relative power or even small influence (that
could stop something, or speak out, etc), then people with interests (from
government, industry, etc) can blackmail you with your private information on
any of those categories, to vote or do something in their favor or look the
other way.

Democracy always progresses through people working against certain laws and
customs and cultural ideas. Child labor, women's rights, universal vote, black
rights, gay rights, etc. And since those things are established, those people
work against laws/majority opinion/powerful interests/etc.

So they do have a need to keep their ideas or moves or who sympathizes
secretly, etc secret while they work towards their goal (plus anything else
that could be used to blackmail them or hurt them, even if not relevant to
that cause - e.g. MLK's affairs had nothing to do with his cause, but they
could still be used to discredit him at the time).

And since people are people, even a very good person, working towards a very
legit cause, or wanting to prevent some bad from happening, could still have
illegal activity of his own that he doesn't want to be made public and hurt
them. E.g. they could be doing psychedelic drugs.

I don't see why someone in the US e.g. can be so self-congratulating on
"nothing to hide in a democracy", when they had Jim Crow until the 40s,
segregation until the 70s, McCarthy, Hoover, Watergate, modern mass
surveillance, frequent police abuse (from Serpico to Rodney King to today),
lots of scandals and abuses that came into light only by whistleblowers
(corporate, governmental, etc), often themselves prosecuted or abused for it,
and so on.

~~~
biolurker1
I agree and this is a very sound argument that I would like to see in the
article.I am pro privacy and I also like arguments to be solid otherwise they
are not convincing enough to turn public opinion. I hope more people read your
comment

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beyondcompute
In my opinion, this does not mention the main point. Individuals (plus
families, small communities, small businesses) loosing their power (privacy in
this case) means corporations and governments get (even) more power. I’ll live
it as an exercise to the reader to see why the latter trend might not be so
good in the long run.

------
sdumi
It is a good reminder, which needs to happen more often. Only a gut feeling
(no real proof), but it seems like the younger generation does not care
because they're so exposed from an early age to all kinds of social media,
influencers, streamers, etc. The older generation does not seem to care
because they're a bit technologically impaired and it's hard enough to try to
keep up. There are exceptions though, and depending on the bubble you live in,
the number of exceptions will differ a lot.

