
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' - mtgx
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
======
ctdonath
In this much-discussed subject, I'm surprised that two huge points never
arise:

1\. The "if you have nothing to hide..." line is predicated on the _viewer_
having final say about whether something is right/wrong, thus subordinating
the subject to the viewer. This is repulsive to the notion of liberty as
protected by the American "4th Amendment" right of freedom from governmental
inspection without an adjudicated warrant. To wit: it's not that I have
something to hide, it's that someone else is going to be obnoxious if they see
it.

On a related but semantically distinct note...

2\. Those pushing "if you have nothing to hide..." have suspect & ulterior
motives. Their existence (income, job, power, prestige) _depend_ on finding
something "wrong". They are, by job description, hostile to me. If they
derived nothing from inspecting others, they would not care whether anything
was hidden or not. Remember: they seek the power to _punish_ , not just what
they find wrong, but what they cannot inspect. Your exposure nets you little,
but gains them so much they want to reprimand you for any concealment.

~~~
jonnathanson
I'm actually surprised that the 4th Amendment isn't referenced more frequently
in refutation to the asinine "nothing to hide" position.

"Nothing to hide" is thematically similar to the groan-inducing "Do you want
the terrorists to win?" arguments against civil liberties, in favor of
increased security measures, proferred and popularly supported in the
mid-2000s. (Sadly, many of the legacies and artifacts of that position still
persist).

The answer to any of these half-baked arguments should always begin with
something along the lines of "Because we're better than that." Because we have
a constitution that assumes we're good people, and that protects our civil
liberties from invasion. Because these things are so fundamental to our
nation's purpose that giving them up is much worse than being attacked. Giving
them up threatens the very purpose of the country's founding.

Even to entertain these arguments, i.e., by trying to cite examples of areas
of privacy or liberty that are negotiable, areas that aren't, and so forth, is
to stoop low. It is to lose before the argument has actually begun. It is to
accept the faulty premise that privacy is about hiding something -- that it is
an active attempt to conceal information from the world. No, privacy isn't the
action being taken. _Invasion_ of privacy is the action. Privacy is simply a
state of being, and one to which we have an inalienable right.

Privacy isn't something we opt into; it is something we don't even really
consider until we are made, or compelled, or asked to opt out. "Nothing to
hide" begs the question. It assumes, as a foregone premise, that privacy is an
opt-in decision that we consciously undertake in defense of something (and
that something is implied to be onerous or illegal). This is just fallacious
logic, plain and simple.

It's unfortunate that a right to privacy wasn't inumerated directly in the
constitution, but was instead defined indirectly. This is one of those areas
where the founders really couldn't have known how far technology would go, and
how important something like privacy -- which may have been taken for granted
back then -- would become 200+ years later.

~~~
andrewflnr
The bulk of your logic makes sense, besides depending on taking "privacy is an
inalienable right" as a premise. However, on a practical level...

    
    
      "Because we're better than that"
    

In order to fight a war[0] from a "better than that" position, you have to
have vastly greater power, enough to compensate for the hobbles you put on
yourself to remain "better". Otherwise, whoever fights dirtiest wins. When
people are trying to kill us, how do we make up for not listening to them,
without letting people die?

[0] In a loose sense. Terrorists try to kill us, and the only way to stop them
is with force. A lot of the same principles apply.

~~~
khuey
But we do have vastly greater power. Terrorist groups definitely don't have a
budget of 680 billion USD[0].

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#Budget_for_2010)

~~~
dllthomas
While I agree with the point, raw budget comparisons are not a valid way to
make it; terrorists also aren't defending such a big piece of land (and sea),
and are more narrowly focused in scope as well.

~~~
padraigm
The raw budget comparison is not the end of the United States' military
superiority; the US has access to cruise missiles and aircraft targeting
systems that allow them to put a precisely-measured dose of explosive through
practically any window in the world at a few moments' notice. Meanwhile, the
"terrorists" are strapping some fertilizer to a Nokia brick phone and laying
it on the side of the road in the hopes that a truck will drive by so they can
detonate it. The US so vastly out-matches the people it's fighting right now
that they're having to write new strategic doctrine to be able to handle it.
Are you really trying to make the argument that we don't have enough leeway to
keep some principles in the process of defending ourselves?

~~~
dllthomas
Of course the raw budget comparison is not the end of the US's military
superiority; I said I agreed with the parent's general point: that while
additional constraints may make it harder to achieve tactical objectives, we
don't have any trouble achieving tactical objectives.

My point was just that the metric being used was irrelevant to the comparison
being made.

------
mduerksen
If someone knows something about you, he gains power over you.

This is the most fundamental reason I have seen yet, reflected (often
unconsciously) in our daily lives: We have curtains, we talk _in private_ , we
have secrets we only tell to those we trust, have company confidentials,
discretion, spokesmen, and don't negotiate our salaries in public.

Why? Because we instinctively try to minimize those who might take advantage
over us.

Knowledge can be exploited in so many ways that it is very hard to tell if a
certain piece of information is harmless or not. If you're at the mercy of
someone else, depending on him not to exploit his knowledge over you, you lose
freedom.

Most people at least feel this and therefore - in their social interactions -
act accordingly. Interestingly, as soon at no human face is involved, my
observation is that these instincts break down. I believe that's the core
issue today, where most information isn't collected by some creepy stalker,
but by web services, governments and card readers. They seem so detached from
a real (potentially threatening) person, that our deeply engrained secrecy
patterns fail us.

~~~
re_todd
> If someone knows something about you, he gains power over you.

I couldn't agree more. When I graduated from high school, coming from a small
town, I wanted to get a college degree. Unfortunately, I had a low self-esteem
and many friends and relatives that would belittle me or my goal. I don't know
if they were jealous or I was such an underachiever in high school that it was
hard for them to believe I could reach my goal. This really undermined my
confidence and my ability to study, leading me to drop out more than once.
Finally, I stopped hanging around that town, did not tell anyone about my
plans except a few people, and cut off the relationships that put me down the
most. Then I went back to college and it was a breeze. I'm not totally
cynical, but I believe there are a lot of people out there that will use
personal information to hurt you, and it's best to minimize what you tell
others until you know who you can trust.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Surface conformity is one of the best skills you can cultivate. People like
few things more than believing, "this person is _just_ like me in all the
important ways."the larger the group is, the more important it becomes.

------
jgrahamc
In the 1920s being Jewish in Germany was perfectly legal. Not long after it
was not.

That's the only example I need to convince me that the government does not
need to know everything about who am I and what I do and what I think.

~~~
bornhuetter
I honestly don't know how anyone can, with a straight face, ignore this.

~~~
mduerksen
Sadly, people do, even here in Germany.

When I use this example to illustrate how an information that was once "clean"
can become "dirty", they don't seem to understand. They act like that
"incident" is soo far away, some sort of horror story(!) that has nothing to
do with today. Everything will stay like it is now.

I guess the idea of something like 1933 happening again is so frightening or
detached that they just dismiss it.

EDIT: I should add that people who actually _lived_ in the time of Nazi-
Germany might have a very different reaction to jgrahamc's argument. I made my
observation above mainly with young people.

------
csmeder
I am surprised that this subject is so hard to grasp. The core of this issue
is not about privacy. The core issue is about giving a small group too much
power.

Giving one organization too much power in a society is bad for long term
health of that society. If you want your children to grow up in a healthy
society it's on your shoulders to fight laws that give organizations too much
power.

By giving the government unlimited access to our privacy it gives the
government great amounts of power.

Historically when an organization (such as a governments, FBI (J. Edgar
Hoover), Churches, etc) have been given large amounts of power it has quickly
lead to a spiral of corruption and destruction of morality and societal
values.

If some one tells you:

    
    
       "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
    

Tell them:

    
    
       "I want you to sign over all of your assets to 
       a government official of my choice. If you 
       trust the government, you've got nothing to fear."
    
    

The "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." statement is
analogous to a lover, locking a bomb to your neck and telling you "If you
don't plan on hurting me, then you have nothing to fear". The desire for this
kind of power over some one is clinically insane. The desire to have this kind
of power over our citizens by politicians is just as clinically insane. It
will destroy our society.

~~~
waffle_ss
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton

------
philbarr
I think the simplest argument against people who propose "nothing to hide" is
to say, "I have nothing to hide, I just don't trust those morons to keep my
data safe and secure."

I used to work in the education sector, and we had access to "anonymised"
data. I was able to determine my own National Insurance number using only my
address as I'd done an HND a few years before. Basically, anonymising meant
removing the first and last name fields only! This was working for a private
sector firm that was given the data by the government. I was also on only
£10k/year and so presumably a vulnerable target for corruption. And this
wasn't even one of the more "secure" datasets we had access to.

How many others are there like me out there with access to your data?

------
jgroome
I don't like to pick apart articles on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but I
have to take issue with this bit:

 _> In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-
surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via
closed-circuit television._

"The government"? Very tricksy linguistic sleight of hand makes us sound like
an police-state-controlled surveillance society with no privacy and a
tyrannical government.

What rot. By far the vast majority of CCTV in the country is owned and
operated by private companies on their own private property. This is a huge
difference.

 _> In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've
got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."_

Come on now. That's almost cartoonish levels of sloppy writing. No such slogan
has ever been used by either our government, or, as far as I know, any
organisation concerned with security.

~~~
briandon
Fair point w/re to most of the UK's omnipresent CCTV cameras being privately
owned:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362493/One-CCTV-
cam...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362493/One-CCTV-
camera-32-people-Big-Brother-Britain.html)

    
    
      The research involved police community support officers 
      counting every camera in Cheshire and extrapolating the 
      results nationwide to provide a reliable estimate of the 
      level of CCTV surveillance in the UK.
      
      Officers counted 12,333 cameras in the area, according to 
      a study published in CCTV Image magazine, the majority of 
      which were inside premises, rather than facing public 
      street.
      
      The research also found that most CCTV cameras in the UK 
      are likely to be privately owned, with only 504 of 
      Cheshire’s cameras run by public bodies. 
    

In a county of about a million people, only 500+ of the 12,000+ cameras were
owned by a government body.

Of course, one would think that it wouldn't be very difficult for the
authorities to obtain footage from privately-owned cameras.

~~~
jfno67
The fact that the majority of camera is privately owned is not relevant. The
question remains: "Is 500 cameras too many, too little or just about right,
for a county of 1 million?". I have no idea, but I don't see why the ratio
public/private is important.

~~~
rmc
The public/private aspect is important because the question changed from "Is
12,000 cameras …" to "Is 500 cameras …"

~~~
jfno67
The article cited never asked "Is 12,000 ...". They say "Look cameras are not
that bad since most are on premise and are privately owned and operated." I
find that this comparison is dishonest and is not relevant.

edit: changed "you cite" to "cited", The response is not to the OP.

------
tokenizer
Personally, my fears are not about any current laws, but laws that might be
created. I'd much rather for our society to respect privacy in these matters,
especially if we have the potential to create laws I'd disagree with.

Also, if people have nothing to hide, let me access their computers for an
evening, and also let me send any "proof" of breaking "stupid laws", like
watching a dvd on their computer, or accessing a file with unwarranted DMCA
takedown notice out for it. There's a lot of potential for innocent people
going to jail in a video taped society.

~~~
Symmetry
Would they go to jail? Police ignore trivial laws like those against
jaywalking all the time. I remember as a kid riding back from a Boy Scout
event and with a cop driving and him describing which laws every vehicle we
passed were breaking. Not that he'd ever pull them over for those normally -
unless he had a hunch that they were carrying drugs or something.

If crimes as minor as decrypting a DVD were actually prosecuted then it
wouldn't be a lot of people going to jail. It would be everybody. Including
all the cops and judges. Which is never going to happen.

The real danger here is selective enforcement of laws, and the selective
enforcement of laws. Well, we have the later already (see "Professional
Courtesy") but the former gets much more dangerous to the extent that police
officers can control which videos do or do not end up at a courtroom. If a
lawyer can show that the police are regularly ignoring an offense in other
contexts that can be a defense in the US, but in practice the US justice
system does a very bad job of getting exculpatory police collected video
evidence into the hands of defense lawyers.

~~~
lnanek2
Just getting sent to court can be a punishment too, though. It makes you waste
money hiring a lawyer, or waste time going to court yourself. I got sent for
being in a park after dusk the other day, something police never seem to
enforce around here, but suddenly started doing in one certain area because
there was a shooting a while back. So selective enforcement basically let them
nail everyone who spent any time in the park after dusk when they decided it
suited them. Maybe not with jail, but at least with court time or lawyer fees.

------
joshuahedlund
It's really very simple. I'm not doing anything "wrong," but I cannot
guarantee that my definition of "wrong" is the same as the government's.

Recently I've come across an argument that I think helps reveal the problems
to those who are not prone to see them: if you have nothing to hide, would you
give a copy of your house key to the police to check on your house whenever
they want?

Suddenly everything becomes obvious: the cost of inconvenience (what if I'm
asleep?), the cost of potential corruption or incompetence (what if they lose
the key?), the cost of potential misinterpretation, etc...

~~~
TomaszZielinski
Exactly. Translate "doing wrong" to "commiting a crime" and then you end up
with a list of hundreds or thousends of criminal laws that you just can't
know, each of which is subject to interpretation by individuals with different
motivations and attitude towards you, based on potentially incomplete or
misleading data etc. etc.

------
brown9-2
I've always thought the simplest retort to this argument came from Bruce
Schneier:

 _Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be
abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies --
whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing
wrong at the time of surveillance._

<http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html>

------
jamesu
Once i spent a week researching Lotteries on google. Days after, i was getting
an almost constant stream of ads for the National Lottery. If anyone were to
have used my computer during that time, they might have been puzzled by this
and though "Whoah! Is this guy a gambling addict?".

Just imagine if i was researching something slightly more taboo. Someone could
easily jump to the wrong conclusions.

I might have nothing to hide, but it certainly isn't right that my information
is being used to generate a potentially scandalous false picture of what i
might be looking for.

~~~
firefoxman1
That's why information privacy is so important: those ad networks shouldn't be
required to expose your browsing history to anyone (especially the
government).

------
drderidder
Privacy and democracy are inseparable.
[http://51elliot.blogspot.ca/2008/07/your-privacy-is-your-
fre...](http://51elliot.blogspot.ca/2008/07/your-privacy-is-your-freedom.html)

"If your private thoughts were broadcast on a television screen above your
head for everyone to see, its fair to say we'd all be more careful what we
thought about. We would be forced to practice thought control to give others a
good impression. Mental self-discipline is great, but this imaginary scenario
illustrates a critical point: the absence of privacy has the ability to
influence.

Moreover, the one who usurps privacy is the one who wields that influence. And
such control at the cost of privacy is the opposite of freedom. Democracy and
freedom are upheld by the individual's right to form thought and opinion and
to communicate within the haven of privacy."

~~~
iy56
If yours were, perhaps. But if everyone's thoughts were constantly being
broadcast, we'd learn to accept that sometimes people think strange thoughts,
and that it's silly to care so much about it.

~~~
drderidder
That's another way of phrasing the "if you have nothing to hide" argument. A
simpler example of the link between privacy and democracy is that voting is
private. There's a reason for that.

~~~
koide
Although using this argument promotes the idea that privacy equals secrecy.
Privacy is a lot more than secrecy. You expect in day to day life to be
ignored by most people, and certainly are not expecting that your every move
is recorded. If you were, and knew about it, your behavior would be affected.
That's another dimension of privacy that's not usually discussed, there are
more.

------
joshcrews
On the lack of dead bodies from privacy intrusions; they are there.

Ukrainian peasants were deported and killed for having more property that
their neighbor: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization> 14.5 million
dead

Central and Eastern European Jews first had their privacy violated before
their jobs taken, moved to ghettos then to concentration camps. Imagine having
a German last name but a Jewish grandmother, privacy matters. Or imagine if
Germany did not have a handgun registry-- then its harder to confiscate guns
from Jews, which makes its much more dangerous to herd them into camps.

Privacy loss ends in dead bodies-- but only after its too late to regain.

------
lnanek2
None of his retorts really do much for me. I'm fine with people seeing me
naked, seeing my credit bills, querying about relationships, etc.. I do have
curtains, but it is just so the neighbors don't get pissed their kids see me
walking around naked when it's hot.

There is one thing that convinces me, though. I see lots of companies with
data just completely misinterpreting it and screwing people over all the time.
For instance, I can open a bunch of tabs in Google Groups from Google Reader
with the intent to read them later, and get banned by Google Groups because
Google decided in their all knowing wisdom that anyone opening tabs that quick
must by a bot who has to be banned. Similarly you see AdSense and PayPal
accounts banned all the time when the person is actually innocent.

These draconian policies may be good for the company (since it makes sure the
actual fraudsters are banned too) and bad for the innocents caught in the way,
but as an innocent who can be caught in the way, it makes sense to give them
as little data to make up imagined offenses with as possible. Having Google
ban innocents all the time is one thing, but we can't really let the
government get away with that. That's what the whole innocent until proven
guilty business is about and the show me the corpse/evidence and trial by jury
things came about because of.

------
sharagoz
The problem I have with the "nothing to hide" argument is that it is aimed at
secrecy and hence invalid. The issue is never about secrecy, it's about
privacy, and that's a huge huge difference. "I dont need privacy because I
have nothing to hide" doesn't make much sense.

I have long looked for a more crystal clear way of formulating the importance
of privacy and why it's different from having something to hide.

~~~
re_todd
Great point. When people alter one or two key works, it can shift the whole
debate. We need to be aware of that.

------
jusben1369
That was a torturous, long winded, poorly written article. The author
identified early that the retort "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing
to fear" was a powerful one. He then reinforced the power of that retort by
struggling to rebuke it in this article.

------
webwanderings
Link to the book, was at the bottom of this long article.

[http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Nothing-to-
Hide/index...](http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Nothing-to-
Hide/index.html)

------
ameasure
Forgive me for kicking the hornet's nest, but is all this outrage about
privacy or about the abuse of government power?

The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's
government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card
companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've
ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target
know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much
about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading
an email about a friend passing away.

Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some
innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have
complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be
allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone
knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private?
What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at
work be completely private?

The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation
of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and
it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line
should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?

------
jusben1369
What I find most interesting is that few people question why privacy is so
important? Children have no sense of it - they have to be socialized to begin
to value it. Many smaller societies have no sense of it. Yet a small child and
someone from these societies understands immediately if you restrict their
ability to move (and thus "freedom") I'm not sure privacy isn't just an
extension of shamed based cultural values vs a universal human right like
freedom of movement and thought.

~~~
yungchin
> Children have no sense of it

I think such naturalistic arguments don't hold up. Children have no sense of
many things - they don't see dangers in stepping onto a street without
looking, and they don't see dangers in giving up their privacy. If they don't
value it, should we not protect their privacy?

Children and some small societies often don't have a strong sense of property
rights either - yet would you argue from that that a more complex society
still doesn't require property rights?

------
luriel
A somewhat related video that often gets posted, but is worth posting again:
Why you should never talk to the police (even if you have nothing to hide!):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc>

It includes some stories that illustrate why information about you, even when
you have done nothing wrong, can be used against you by authorities, even
purely by mistake not accounting to any corruption/bias/pressure-to-
catch/punish-somebody, etc.

------
drcube
Why are there trade secrets? Why is there classified information? Why is there
encryption? Why are there door locks and window blinds and fences? What was
the big deal about Wikileaks if you have nothing to hide?

If the US government or some MegaCorp wants to dump all of their
correspondence and data, decrypted, onto the internet for my perusal, and
unlock all the doors, safes, fences and windows on their buildings, then I
might consider opening up my personal life to them as well.

------
law
It bothers me when people equate the right of privacy (i.e. the right to be
let alone) with a perceived right of seclusion (i.e. a perceived right to not
be seen/heard/disturbed by others). The disconcerting reality is that privacy
is far more encompassing.

Privacy isn't just about freedom from unwanted attention. It's about your
right to remain free of unwanted intrusions in your life. Privacy law protects
a woman's choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a homosexual male's
choice to privately engage in sodomy with the consent of another, and a
heterosexual couple's choice concerning the use of contraception for non-
procreative sex. Privacy also protects your right to refuse medical attention
for yourself and, in some jurisdictions, on behalf of your minor children. It
additionally applies to a family's choices in rearing their children: the
right to privacy protects a family's choice of religion, meals to eat, whether
to participate in religion, etc.

When people claim that they don't mind putatively invidious legislation
because they have "nothing to hide," they are doing an enormous disservice to
privacy law. They might as well say: "We don't mind the government acting as
our (family's) autopilot."

------
seanica
I've always liked retort, "If I have nothing to hide, why do you chase me?"

~~~
TomaszZielinski
Brilliant!

------
JustNick
'Nothing to Hide' - many peoples think this way, but for friends i was always
trying to explain why privacy is important, why should you use anti virus and
firewall, and do not leak data to Internet my main arguments:

1\. You're computer might be in use for spam or hacking banks and governments
sites. 2\. Data leak - credit cards, accounts, and main - personal
information. 3\. In Ukraine we have joke - Facebook.com - let your wife meet
your lovers. 4\. From your info it is possible to find info on your friends.

And this is for people who have nothing to hide.

Questions of privacy in Internet is a big problem. But privacy should be
privacy, not anonymity.

As for cameras on streets... In future we will have no chance to hide.
Nothing.

------
firefoxman1
The "nothing to hide" argument seems to work just like the "God moves in
mysterious ways" argument. It's sort of an end-of-the-road conversation-
stopper. It's hard to reply to it, therefore the party who said it gets to
feel like they're right.

------
msg
Because our interests are not aligned.

Because you have to earn intimacy.

Because my sharing is not reciprocated.

Because I don't trust you.

------
evincarofautumn
I’m honest, and not a huge fan of clothing, so I ostensibly _do_ have nothing
to hide. But there is a difference between being an open book and letting
anyone read you at any time for any reason. If you have nothing to hide, you
have nothing to fear— _if and only if_ no one will abuse your information. Not
to mention people just _like_ privacy, and it’s a basic right.

If someone were to walk in on me having sex, I might be a bit embarrassed, but
not unduly bothered. If a voyeur were to surreptitiously watch me, that’d be a
breach of privacy. It’s about who’s consuming the information, not who’s
producing it.

------
wizzard
It seems like whenever people say this they are only considering wiretapping
or similar invasions that don't cause them any personal inconvenience. They're
not thinking about the TSA, personal searches, searches of their property,
confiscation of their property for further investigation, etc.

My response is something like "so you'd be fine with a random mandatory search
of your house twice a year, that takes 12 hours, during which all your
electronic devices will be confiscated for two weeks of processing?" They'll
say "no, that doesn't happen." But it will with their attitude.

------
jfoutz
It depends heavily on the type of information, and how secret it is.

I'd be thrilled to have access to a complete real time data of every financial
transaction.

Imagine looking at any object around you, and being able to tell how much each
component cost, the source of the component, and the company info that
transformed the parts into an object, recursively all the way down to dust.

That would be _amazing_. Even more, that would be enough for me want to make
my financial info public to the world, rather than just credit card companies,
and everyone that buys that data from them.

------
user49598
Plus, how can we ever relent our right to privacy from a government that is
content with its own mountains of hidden information. If we are to be wire
tapped, photographed and body scanned, then filming of government agents, like
the TSA, should be something the government is not only in favor of, but is
excited about.

The nothing to hide argument doesn't stand unless every person in the country
is constantly surveilled and all information collected is fully accessible to
everyone.

------
harryf
To me it's seems the real problem we're having with privacy today is there's
nothing protecting our privacy beyond a thin layer of legislation. The best
real solution I've come across is providing individuals with apps and services
that generate fake data about you, masking your real behavior. For example
your photo gets tagged at some bar. In response you have a tool able to tag
you in 30 other photos supposedly taken at the same time but in different
settings.

------
diminoten
This is the worst argument I've ever seen in response to the "nothing to hide"
statement, because it's simply the retort, "Yes, you do."

Can someone give me an argument against "nothing to hide" that doesn't boil
down to "yes, you do!"? Honestly, I live somewhere squarely in the middle of
the "nothing to hide" camp, and would really like to not be, if at all
possible. I just can't justify changing my position on this if I don't know of
a valid argument, however.

------
rytis
And how is this mass surveilance in US/UK/other "free and democratic"
countries different from what was happening in USSR way back? Western
propoganda was all over it, but I suspect that it was just a way to hide the
real threat (own government). Since USSR ceased to exist few attempts have
been made to invent a new threat, but that worked only partially...

The reality is, try as we might, there is no way to regain full privacy. Ever.

------
steauengeglase
The Solove/Bartow thing has been bouncing around for a few years now.

One of Bartow's responses: [http://madisonian.net/2011/05/26/of-debunking-and-
willful-di...](http://madisonian.net/2011/05/26/of-debunking-and-willful-
distortions/)

She seems to be more annoyed with the idea that Solove's writings read like a
High School sophomore's rather than the validity of his arguments.

------
maked00
I had a friend that had no problems with giving up privacy in regards to his
personal communications over the internet, but he would go totally bananas
when a hospital asked to hold his ID so he would stick around to give an
outpatient their ride home. People are very irrational regarding these
matters.

------
pulplobster
I'm almost as scared about privacy breaches in the private sector. I read a
while back about Target sending out ads for pregnancy related products to a
teenage girl. Their data crunching algorithms had picked up on the fact that
she was pregnant before she even told her parents.

------
Mordor
Any state with national security already understands that we all have
something to hide and we do it because it is in our own best interests. The
state, after all, does not act in our best interests, but its own. Or to be
more precise, the people that run it!

------
e12e
One of the best commentaries I've read on this topic, is still:

"THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY." by Warren and Brandeis -- originally published in
1891(!):

    
    
      http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37368/37368-h/37368-h.htm
    

Very well written, and illuminating to this day.

------
achy
There's a huge difference between privacy and secrecy. Any debate about this
topic that does not immediately make that distinction is futile. I don't keep
secrets from my wife, but I still close the door when I use the washroom.

------
ffffruit
An analogy I always like to use is: would you object to a team visiting your
home, searching through all your physical and electronic belongings and then
replacing everything exactly as they found it?

------
uvTwitch
Oh you have nothing to hide? Well show me your genitals then.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

------
mgunes
The author's original essay from San Diego Law Review (2007):

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565>

------
jeffdavis
In other news: "Why getting punched in the face matters, even if you heal".

Seriously, out of all of the human emotions, why do we constantly feel the
need to justify the desire for privacy?

------
JoyxBen
Like Minority Report except instead of three psychics it's a pattern matching
computer algorithm running over your data.

------
BoppreH
Privacy is not hiding, it's preventing misuse. There's a reason lottery
winners prefer anonymity.

------
78704
The distortion argument is weak; transparency solves it as well as opacity
does.

------
sergeyk
"If I have nothing to hide, you've got no reason to look."

------
kmfrk
_'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy_ :
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=0998565>

Has a download link in it to the 28-page essay. Compared to this really turgid
article by the same author, the essay is really engrossing. Incidentally, I
just finished reading it a few days ago on a privacy paper binge, and I also
recommend

 _Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of
Anonymization_ : <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006>

which is an even better paper, although it clocks in at 77 pages. Also free.

Some fun findings:

1\. The combination of ZIP code, birth date (including year), and sex is
unique to 87 per cent of Americans. Cross-reference this with voter data, and
you're busted.

2\. The information of how and when you rated any three movies on Netflix can
identify more than 80 per cent of its users (68% for two movies). Cross-
reference this with IMDb database, and you're busted.

It's scary as hell to learn that privacy is an even harder problem to solve,
as someone who cares deeply about it. The key take-away from the latter paper
is that privacy and utility are mutually exclusive - you can't "anonymize"
data. The second is that we have to rethink our concept of personal
identifiable information, because _everything_ can be used to whittle down the
candidates to a unique person with the right information.

We are so far from implementing useful privacy measures legally and
practically that it's ridiculous. We are being embarrassingly myopic by only
turning our attention to social networks, when there are privacy
vulnerabilities everywhere.

Unless it's biometric data that we can relate to our own body - retina,
fingerprint, facial features, DNA, etc. - , there is some psychological
mechanism that makes us less averse and sensitive to the collection of data
about us. Compare how you feel about the police storing DNA and fingerprints
of acquitted suspects to how the NSA is trying to basically data-mine the
entire communication infrastructure. That is, when careless companies or
witless users don't just hand the information to them directly.

For people who care as much as privacy, as people in technology circles do, we
have a really bad habit of focusing our attention narrowly at mainly what
Silicon Valley does. But consider the value of something as simple as your zip
code, birth date, and sex, and how many sites you might hand out that
information to - the last information of which can usually be inferred by the
service or commodity you buy, or your name.

------
chasingtheflow
tldr; anyone?

------
ktizo
The 'nothing to hide' arguments almost always seem to focus on the individual,
but the full power of mass surveillance is not really about the control of
specific individuals, but rather about control of the group. Just as in the
measurement of temperature, where the motion of individual atoms is
unimportant compared to the average, so the information gathered about single
people is unimportant compared to the ability to accurately measure the group.
If you want to hunt down single actors you do not need cameras everywhere, you
just need to infiltrate their social circle. But to influence entire societies
and to learn how to steer them is something that requires a ton of hard data
on as wide a range of people as possible. Kafka's The Trial might be the
perceived effect on the individual, but Asimov's Foundation series would seem
the ultimate political aim of these kind of policies.

