Ask HN: Why does privacy matter? - sudo_vi
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jmts
Could you provide your bank details please? Passport or other photo
identification would be nice. I'd also like a copy of your browser history for
the last 5 or so years, full records of your sexual history, transcriptions of
any embarrassing, controversial, or regrettable conversations or interactions
you've had, your home address, annotated photographs of your house keys, any
vehicle registrations, and uh, you don't happen to know anything about
nitroglycerine do you?

You can reply here, in response to this post, I'm okay with that.

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Doxin
Things that are fully legal today might not be tomorrow. Things that aren't
taboo today might be tomorrow.

Without privacy you can be persecuted at any moment for anything you might
have done in the past.

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visarga
Privacy creates a 'safe space' for experimentation and self expression.
Destroying it would lead to self censuring and have a chilling effect on
personal development. When the only private space is inside your head your
freedom (your options) are severely affected, normal life looks more and more
like prison. A large, open prison, but still a prison.

That's what it felt like living under communism before 1989 in Eastern Europe
when your neighbour, your teacher or your friend could be a state informer
ratting you out.

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blakesterz
There was this recent thread that had a pile of good answers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066101)

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docdeek
Good answers here: [https://teachprivacy.com/10-reasons-privacy-
matters/](https://teachprivacy.com/10-reasons-privacy-matters/)

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throwaway187346
There are two main reasons I can think of:

1\. If you don't have privacy, governments can collect a psychological profile
of you, which can be used to manipulate you at an individual level if they
need to, or as a data point in a large data set to manipulate the society as a
whole. It's still in it's infancy, but I bet governments are using AI exactly
for this kind of thing

2\. If you have something to hide This doesn't need to be anything necessarily
illegal or bad, it can just be embarrassing. This actually happened to me.
When I was really young, 8-9 years old, I had what psychologists call "play
sex" with some cousins. We didn't know what we were doing, but it's enough to
mess you up as an adult. Over a decade ago I was dating a girl and things were
going south. I thought maybe she thought something was off about me, so I
decided I should try to tell her. But I was too embarrassed to tell her in
person, so I emailed her telling her what happened when I was young. The
relationship pretty much ended there, I kept the email as kind of a way to
come to terms with what happened. I never talked to anyone about it before. A
few years ago I ended up in a very strange situation. I had graduated with a
CS degree from a very good school, but I had trouble landing my first job.
After a year of job searching, my grace period for student loans were running
out and I had to find anything I could fast. I had a ton of debt. I was taking
an online algorithms course to improve my whiteboard interview skills, I asked
someone there who lived in a different country whether their company was
hiring, he said he'd ask them. After a completely dry spell, the next day I
had two recruiters call me and said that their client companies wanted to
interview me badly and that they move quickly in hiring. I scheduled the
interviews back-to-back. The first company's interview went well, and it was
strange because they wanted to hire me immediately, said that I had to accept
immediately as I was driving to the next company for interview. It was a low
offer but I accepted it, though I went to the second interview anyway to see
if I could get a better offer. I went to the second interview, got a much
better offer, and they wanted to hire me immediately. The second company was a
foreign company, something didn't smell right. But I just shrugged it off, I
assumed that sometimes things just line up like that for jobs. So I took the
second job and I told the first job that I won't be joining them. I went ahead
and arranged everything, rent, transportation, etc. I arranged to ship my car
to the new city where I'd be working. Two weeks in I had to call the car place
to arrange for where to pick up my car. Instead of getting the car place, it
went to some other hotline and an automated voice responded with something
like: "You've reached the incest survivor hotline. Congratulations, you're the
[X]th caller and you've won a 2 week vacation..." I thought it was odd, I
called again. Same message. I waited for the automated voice to end so I could
talk to a person, some hispanic guy said it's the incest hotline. I went back
to look at the number I needed to call, it was the right one. I called a third
time to the same number and I got the actual car place. Someone was trying to
threaten or blackmail me, and they obviously managed to hack my email account
because I never told anyone else about that. Still I even shrugged even this
off as a coincidence, because sometimes weird stuff just happens. But it
became very clear over the course of working for that company that I was
marked, but I have no idea what I did wrong. It escalated into a very serious
situation, I'm surprised I'm still alive today.

