
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [pdf] - captn3m0
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
======
Irregardless
"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an
excuse in them to hang him." \-- Cardinal Richelieu

~~~
zxcdw
This is a huge problem with a surveillance state. Everyone has _something_
which you can use against them. This means that if you piss off wrong people
you're going to jail. Otherwise not. Possible implications to politic balance
are astounding.

~~~
temp453463343
"This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail."

Except that's not the reality. The reality is that if Obama really really
hates someone and wants to make their life miserable, the most he can do it
make it hard for him to fly (ie. the no-fly list). The government is
constrained in what it can do, surveillance and omniscience doesn't change
that.

~~~
kaoD
So the economic crisis finally rocks the US to its foundation. A charismatic
but authoritarian leader surfaces (let's name him... I don't know, Hutlor?).
Common populace vote him out of desperation based on his promises to bring
back US to its place in the world.

A few months later Hutlor shows his true face, the government radicalizes and
becomes violent. Hutlor's party does NOT like homosexuals. He does not like
people posting on Hacker News either. But the average Joe is not homosexual
nor a Hacker News reader, so nobody actually cares.

Then Hutlor's right-hand man comes up with a great idea: they'll just take
those nice backups that the NSA collected in their huge datacenters and track
down homosexuals (and Hacker News users).

Now you're screwed.

With this I mean: it's not the _statu quo_ but whatever the future might
bring.

PS: I know, Godwin's law.

~~~
temp453463343
Yeah, if you think the US is going to go fascist you're living in a fantasy
land. You wouldn't just need a depression, you would need the whole fabric of
society to unravel and become as poor as pre WW2 Germany.

No country with a high GDP has turned authoritarian. Authoritarianism doesn't
work in wealthy countries.

~~~
short_circut
Japanese internment camps were not a fantasy land. The US exhibits fascist
qualities all the time. We don't usually call it that but there are certainly
examples which could be considered that way.

~~~
temp453463343
You mean back when people thought blacks were less human than white and women
didn't have the right to vote? Back when a depression meant people starving to
death?

We're not the same society we were back in the 1940s.

------
susi22
Daniel Solove also wrote a longer version of this in his book:

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172338)

~~~
waster
He also discussed some of his ideas in this article in the Chronicle of Higher
Education in 2011: [http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-
if/127...](http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/) .

~~~
waster
... which says it's an excerpt from the book.

------
dasil003
I'm all for bringing the most reasoned arguments to bear, but what I think we
need immediately are the best way of explaining this to the apathetic and
people who buy into the argument by default. We need sound bites, we need
tweets and FB messages, we need short commentary that cuts to the heart of the
issue in a way that can wake people up.

I'm not big into politics, but seeing the apathy in the media and general
ignorance of the populace is utterly terrifying. This can only be fixed if we
can get a real bi-partisan movement going (which, given the facts, should be a
no-brainer) and find a way to counter the fear-based rhetoric that is so easy
to package in digestible sound bites for middle America to swallow. Even Ira
Glass, from This American Life, who clearly should be better informed was
totally "meh" on the issue in the last episode. How can we get people to wake
up?

~~~
visarga
Here are my arguments, as many as I could think of (or heard from other
people):

\- There are thousands of laws and regulations, many quite vague in their
application. Even the government can't tell their exact number. Are you sure
you are not violating any of them?

\- Even if you've done nothing illegal, if they really have to get you all
they need to do is dig dirt on someone close to you. Are you still ok with
mass surveillance? Everyone's got a cousin with a drug problem or something
similar.

\- If you want to plan a surprise trip to Hawaii for your spouse, is it OK to
want to keep it a secret? Does the "nothing illegal -> nothing to hide"
argument hold here?

\- If you are a creative person, would you like your new novel or album to be
leaked from your DropBox, Gmail or some other account to the world?

\- Why would Apple hide its new products until the official release? Would it
be OK for their trade secrets to be laid bare? After all, they are fully
legal, thus, nothing to hide?

\- If you are in business, bidding for contracts, would you like to have your
communications observed by potentially rival entities?

\- You have an email account with spam filters? They can label homosexuals,
liberals, tea partiers and such just as easily as they label a spam.

\- Do you use Google? Google makes use of a network analysis algorithm called
Page Rank. In a similar way, Big Brother could rank people by their social
influence (I believe FB calls its version 'EdgeRank'). They could get a list
of "100 top influencers" in any social network. They could do that with the
metadata from phone calls alone.

\- Would it be OK for the government to know who's organizing protests against
them? To have blackmail material on their opponents?

\- Even with phone metadata alone they could see our social networks and
movements. That would give them powerful inside information from what is
considered mostly harmless data. It's not in each data point alone, it's in
their aggregate that such information emerges.

\- Is it OK for the government to monitor the communications of lawyers,
doctors and psychologists? We entrust them with our most sensitive
information.

\- What will be the impact of mass surveillance on social activism? Don't we
need to counter balance the government any more? Do we trust these guys
implicitly?

\- Information is power. Massive, asymmetrical information. They know about
you everything, you know nothing about them or how they are using your info.

\- In the future this database could be leaked and then you'd become
blackmail-able by third entities. Imagine what the mafia would do with a
database of people's secrets. If Snowden was able to get his hands on it and
leak it, don't you think mafia could do the same? They could use a mole inside
NSA to extract blackmail material. Hell, NSA might trade information on you
with anyone if they get an advantage. Maybe NSA needs to place an informant
using the mafia, while mafia wants some dirt on legitimate people and
businesses to extract money from them.

\- In the future all countries will (if they are not already) intercept their
digital communications. The logic goes: everyone is doing it, so we need to do
it too, otherwise we'd be at a disadvantage and not be able to defend
ourselves. Imagine a world in which not just NSA, but hundreds of entities,
national or corporate, have data on you. They could use that data for whatever
interest they have. You could be indirectly targeted just for being associated
with a certain person or company.

\- Searching terrorists by statistical analysis of people's data doesn't work
so well. The problem is mathematical: say there is just one terrorist in a
million people. Even if you have a system that is 99.9% accurate, that means
1000 people flagged. That's one thousand false matches for one potential true
one. Those people would then be harassed and investigated even though they are
innocent. The system is bad in principle. It doesn't do so well on account
that terrorists are few and normal people many. If you had a company that
produced 999 defected products for every good one, would that be acceptable?

------
hga
Strongly recommended by the libertarian law professor Glenn Reynolds, best
known as the Instapundit link blogger,
[http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/](http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/170554/):
" _It’s the #1 paper on SSRN for all-time downloads, and with good reason._ "

~~~
dfc
Part of the "good reason" that it is the number one downloaded paper is "the
rich get richer" phenomena[1][2] and that it is a paper that is related to
online/internet legal scholarship. It is certainly a great paper but most
downloaded paper is not a sign that it is the pinnacle of legal scholarship. A
recent article about the most cited legal papers of all time had this to say:

    
    
      "With the proliferation of services available for faculty to share their
      scholarship online, “download” or “view” counts have also become a domi-
      nant marker of “impact,” particular ly download counts from subject
      and institutional repositories. (Some full-text research databases and
      other com- mercial services have begun to refl ect usage statistics in
      their products.  This type of metric differs significantly from citation
      metrics: it is really a measurement of the “popularity” or visi bility
      of the article, noting whether an abstract was viewed or visited and
      whether a link was clicked rather than whether the paper was actually
      read, thought well of, and used. 
      ...
      The top downloaded paper of all time on SSRN as of the writing of this
      Article appears on none of Shapiro’s lists.  81 Furthermore, only one
      paper on Shapiro’s all-time top 100 list in Table I or recent-articles
      list in Table II appears in SSRN’s top 100 downloaded papers ( Property,
      Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark A. Lemley). Of the top
      100 downloaded law authors in SSRN, only 15 are on any of Shapiro’s
      lists. Looking at the au- thors listed in the recent-articles lis t in
      Table II, the author’s most downloaded paper of all time appears in this
      list only approximately half the time. It is clear that while arguably a
      metric in and of itself, being a top downloaded paper in SSRN does not
      equate with being a top-cited paper of all time. One could argue that an
      artic le’s presence in newer cited-reference services might potentially
      provide a new metric, but as with other metrics, it is subject to the
      volatility of the source content."[3]
    
    

[1] [https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-
book/netwo...](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-
book/networks-book-ch18.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-
free_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network)

[3]
[http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_a...](http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_and_Pearse_2013.pdf)

~~~
hga
"..."

I guess all I can say is that you believe you have better insight into the
mind of Glenn Reynolds than e.g. I do.

~~~
dfc
My use of an ellipsis was to indicate that I cut some material from the quote.
I do not understand why you quoted "..." My comment had to do with the reason
why it is the number one downloaded paper.

~~~
hga
"..." is a convention I first found in manga, which indicates a character has
no (immediate) verbal reply to what was just previously said or happened.

~~~
dfc
I'm confused, you have a verbal reply right below the manga ellipsis.

~~~
hga
I had no _immediate_ verbal reply....

~~~
dfc
Now that you updated the definition it makes a little more sense, but not a
lot more since HN is not a creative writing assignment. It was unclear given
your initial reply:

 _"..." would be a quote, albeit an entirely weird one.

"..." is a convention I first found in manga, which indicates a character has
no verbal reply to what was previously just said._

~~~
hga
Yeah, my initial reply failed in a sense because there's no distinction
between italicized and plain periods. The first that you quote above was
entered as double quote star dot dot dot star double quote, but rendered the
same as the second without the stars (asterisks).

------
MarkHarmon
"Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s
interests, but the protection of the individual based on society’s own norms
and values."

Was it intended to be "Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual
against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual FROM
society’s own norms and values."?

I want to make sure I'm understanding the concept. The original means to me
that the individual is protected by the norms and values of society. The
revised version means the individual is protected from society's norms and
values. It seems like both should be true.

~~~
mkruso
While I agree with your last statement, I don't think the author made a
mistake. His point here is that privacy is about _more than_ protecting the
individual for the individual's sake.

In context of the preceding paragraphs:

Etzioni viewed privacy as a battle between the interests of individuals and
society.

Dewey proposed that privacy is also a social interest, not just an individual
interest.

The author is agreeing with the latter: "the value of protecting the
individual is a social one."

Really, this means both of your interpretations. A society with privacy
_values_ protecting individuals from some of its _other_ norms and values.

I've never heard of these people before reading this, and I'm not trying to be
pedantic. Just my textual interpretation.

[edit - for clarity, but I may have made it worse.]

------
dhughes
An interesting take on this at reddit submitted by user 'thenewlove':
[http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1gdb63/ysk_ab...](http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1gdb63/ysk_about_the_base_rate_fallacy_or_why_the/)

Also mentioned in the post by user 'eleven7' is the book "Thinking Fast and
Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

------
dfc
Most cited legal paper regarding the right to privacy:

The Right to Privacy, Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, 4 Harv. L. Rev.
193 (1890)

[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html)

------
triplesec
Don't forget this classic, relevant to this, and pertinent to other news since
the 5th amendment decision is rather current today: Don't talk to Police (Top
Law Prof and Cop tell you why)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

------
420365247
Best quote... “If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means
you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that
photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?”

------
nly
Requires registration to download the paper...

Mirror:
[http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf](http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf)

~~~
vollmond
I just clicked the OP link, then clicked "Download this paper" and I had it. I
have no account and have never visited SSRN before...

EDIT: On clicking "download" a second time, I do get a login page -- but it
still has a "download anonymously" option, says you just won't count towards
the paper's stats.

~~~
nly
Yeah, good spot. An Incognito or Private window will also work.

------
dyanisse
Does anyone want to write a summary of this paper in his blog? it would be
fantastic!

~~~
waster
Or her?

------
woodchuck64
So people are willing to tolerate the infinitesimal personal risk of an
invasion of privacy by the government in order to diminish the infinitesimal
personal risk of a terrorist attack. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

~~~
diminoten
Well, the problem comes with how the government uses the data it has on you.

Say, for example, I have... 10,000 points of data about you. 10,000 HN posts +
Facebook posts + Reddit posts, etc. You've said a lot during your Internet
career.

I can take what you've written, and form a profile of you from these words.
They're just words, you've done nothing wrong. Freedom of speech being what it
is, and let's even say you haven't said anything particularly inflammatory.
Nothing threatening, nothing dangerous - you're just an average guy.

Now, I take these words, and I compare them with words that other folks have
said. Using some fancy technology, I can group you with people who say thinks
kind of like what you say. Using this data, I can group _everyone_ this way,
into clouds.

And here's where things get sticky - I can use these clouds of people to look
at folks who are "similar" to known terrorists. Folks who, themselves, have
done _nothing_ wrong, but who "look" similar to people I know are bad. Let's
say, for some reason, you're grouped with someone who has known ties to I
dunno... the militant branch of the KKK or whatever. Now you're suddenly
interesting to the authorities, even if you've done literally nothing wrong.
Or have you?

If you're grouped via my super special technology with a terrorist, maybe this
puts you on a no-fly list. Maybe this gets your security clearance denied.
Maybe you get "randomly" audited. World-ending? No. Completely unwarranted and
totally annoying? Yes.

On a philosophical level, this is all kinds of against the freedoms we expect
to have in America, and that sucks but let's be more practical. People are
screaming about the sky falling and the world ending because the NSA knows you
like Japanese porn or whatever, but that's not frankly a big deal. What's more
likely is that you're going to be annoyed and inconvenienced, and there's not
a lot of reason for it.

It kind of sucks, and I guess you have to decide for yourself if you're okay
with what might happen to someone if they turn out to be a false positive. For
me, I don't so much mind the data collection, I just want it to be fully
exposed. I want Google, Microsoft, et. al. to have to say publicly when they
comply with a request for data, and in a perfect world, I'd want these
companies to be required to notify the people whose data they hand over. Does
it make it more difficult to catch bad guys? Yes. Does it provide a level of
transparency that a representative democracy requires to function properly?
Yes.

If they collect too much data (or too little!) I want to be able to vote
someone out of office. Just saying, "attacks haven't happened so therefore
what we're doing is working" isn't something I can buy. Is that too much to
ask?

~~~
Karunamon
> Now you're suddenly interesting to the authorities, even if you've done
> literally nothing wrong. Or have you?
    
    
        <reply type="devils-advocate">
    

This argument could be taken to mean that the fear isn't that information is
being collected, aggregated, and analyzed, but fear in that algorithms will be
wrong and results will be misinterpreted or misused.

As technology advances, both of these problems will reduce more and more.

Furthermore, if I came up with some kind of math that could determine with a
high degree of certainty that someone is a
(terrorist/communist/pedophile/father raper) given their online activities,
the authorities would be negligent _not_ to follow up on that information and
determine if it's valid or not.

Much like spam, verified false positives help train the filters further.

That leaves only the abuse argument.. and honestly, I don't see /potential/
abuse as an argument against any kind of technological advance. We have ways
of dealing with abuse.

~~~
diminoten
I'd argue that we _don 't_ have any good ways of dealing with abuse/misuse,
and that's precisely the problem with such a system.

And let's not forget the "verified false positives" are counted in lives
ruined/ended. Could we do it? Yeah, no one's denying that. But if we throw out
ethics in the name of technological progress, we could do a lot of great
things.

There's not really a deterministic line, beyond which a person is "certainly"
a threat. At the end of the day, a person has to decide what is and isn't a
threat, all the computer can do is help that decision along. A person pulls
the trigger, and as we all know, people can really suck sometimes.

