
"I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy - clicks
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:O3B82qFAryYJ:crysp.uwaterloo.ca/courses/pet/F07/cache/solove.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShp1IMB8efmYTKhQ_dfbaoJHBYg7vfzPO6AB0fCEy48VYQWoTBgUuvV2O-FxLqbPn7eopWtntkd8Sc4B1eBv9eSpRAeruhz0kX8vE_zIe_xDqHT2Rq33WxypBquDtykgaE_9Cl0&sig=AHIEtbRdnRmPsMKW8z7M_uz0xlFg8iOKBQ
======
iwwr
In short, at the risk of trivializing the argument:

The ability to gleam private details about people is having some power over
them. The entire modern theory of government rests on limiting and dividing up
the power of those in power. With mass surveillance, that balance is broken.
Not only do we have private details on individuals, that knowledge is held by
a small and unaccountable elite, protected by state secrets.

Even if you live completely lawfully and morally and truly have nothing to
hide you can either:

1\. Unwittingly do something illegal (there are too many laws on the books for
anyone to know they are completely innocent); or do something that can be
construed as such, since the police and prosecutors can be fallible;

2\. Still live in a society where a small group of individuals can exert
blackmail and intimidation on a significant proportion of citizens. Even if
that power would be rarely used, it creates an environment of fear. People
start to be afraid to speak against abuse, those in power stand less for their
own scrutiny.

~~~
techsupporter
The "unwittingly do something illegal" is the most common refutation I've
heard used. I think it's the most powerful as an example of the fallacy of
this argument and an example of how unwieldy our laws have become in the
United States.

A coworker used the following story, apt since he lives in a state bordering
another country: "Let's say I go to Canada for a day trip, Montreal perhaps. I
speak enough French to get around but it's not so good after an evening of
drinking and socializing. The next morning, I wake up with a powerful hangover
headache. A pharmacy is nearby, but my head is pounding too hard to read the
labels so I go to the pharmacist. In broken French, I ask him for some
Tylenol. He asks me 'what kind?' 'Just one,' I reply. He sells me a small
bottle with a Tylenol label; I pop a couple and put the rest in my bag. After
I return home--declaring 'nothing' at the border, of course, since I forgot
about the bottle of medicine--I find the bottle and notice the word 'Codeine'
on the label. Canada sells 'Tylenol One,' a compound with this addition. I'm
technically guilty of felony drug trafficking of a schedule 2 narcotic into
the United States as well as felony concealment (drugs). Are you certain
you've never done something seemingly innocent that's actually a serious
crime?"

~~~
wippler
Are you sure about this? Reading wikipedia suggests only 90mg or higher unit
dosage falls under Schedule II narcotic. You may not be guilty after all :)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codeine#North_America>

~~~
pi18n
This is not a helpful comment. The anecdote is not suggesting that everyone
who commits an accidental crime is trafficking Tylenol One. It's a story about
how a small action can turn out to be a felony. This has been true in other
cases that have nothing to do with Codeine.

~~~
baddox
The anecdote relies on it being possible or such a situation to occur.

~~~
pi18n
Perhaps that particular situation cannot occur, but similar situations can and
do occur.

The point of the anecdote is that it is possible to commit a very serious
crime without any mens rea or even realization.

------
hooande
Let me try to present the other side of this argument in a way that doesn't
sound crazy:

When one of your people dies, it really hurts. If you were the one in charge
of guaranteeing the safety of that person, its a failure much deeper and more
profound than the worst startup company failure. Most people will be willing
to do _anything_ to prevent the loss of another life on their watch. The
monitoring of communications seems almost small in comparison to the lengths
that many would go to.

There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad
people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will
continue. [1] Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them,
or at least to ensure that they can't act openly. Very few innocent people
will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are
very small.

Privacy could easily considered to be a basic right of all people. But it
lives in a continuum like everything else that we value. Some times it's
better if the government errs on the side of caution. And most of the time,
people have nothing to hide.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents>

~~~
alan_cx
Shame you are down voted for this because you have an important point, our
human contradiction.

If government lets something bad happen because of privacy issues, we the
people complain, and can vote them out. If the government pull out all the
stops, including trampling all over privacy, then we don't like that either,
and can vote them out. So what is a government supposed to do?

The next problem is that we the people say its fine for our governments to
abuse the rights of "them". We don't mean "us". But government has to get that
distinction right, and to do so, as best as they can, they have to cut through
privacy and decency. That's fine for "them", but not "us". If its some Arab in
gitmo, meh, whatever. If its some western god fearing christian, hmmm, that
can produce a different response. If its me or my friend, we can get very
upset about it.

In the end, people have to make a real grown up choice. We need to decide how
far this goes, and accept the risk that goes with that. That risk works two
ways. Risk of say a terror attack and risk of our own governments increasingly
ruining our lives. And this is a cold numbers game. Think about it, are you or
me more likely to be killed in something like 9/11 against perhaps daily
government interference.

In many ways this is our fault. We expect too much and are not prepared to
accept the risk or responsibility. Personally, I'd rather have my privacy and
freedom, with a higher risk of being killed in a terror attack. I'd rather
those who oppose those freedoms didn't win by making our society more like
their ideal. If an attack happened and my government _proved_ that it did
everything possible, but privacy protection for us all got in the way, I
personally would accept that. Its the price of freedom.

Mind you, them and us again. Of course Im calculating that the chances are I
personally wont be involved in a terror attack, and the victims will just be
another "them"......

Contradictions............

~~~
mikevm
Are you so naive as to think that the real terrorists will be communicating in
the open? "Real" terrorists will use Tor, TrueCrypt, PGP, Steganography and
any other tool in the toolkit to hide their tracks. I don't see how a gov't
surveillance apparatus is going to catch any of them.

IIRC, in 9/11 the problem wasn't that there wasn't enough surveillance,
because information regarding the attacks DID reach the White House, but it
was apparently ignored.

~~~
RestlessMind
"Real terrorists" communicated in open using mobile phones, during 2008
terrorist attacks on Mumbai. These conversations were tapped by Indian
government and were used in further investigations:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks#cite_note-D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks#cite_note-
DossierNYT-101)

------
zmmmmm
It's interesting how people struggle with this argument. Just the fact that
this guy needs to write a 30 page essay to explain the point tells you
something.

However I tend to stop short of this kind of analysis, because it all seems to
be trying too hard. My argument, is that in the end it's just biological.
We're built this way (not all, but most of us). Perhaps for good reasons,
perhaps not, but it doesn't really matter. We can't rationalize or deconstruct
it any better than we can needing sex, fearing the dark or the extreme
reaction a person has to waterboarding. It just is how it is - we evolved to
want privacy, and now we _need_ it and that's that. Trying to deconstruct
"why" we want it at a deeper level might be interesting, but it is not useful
for producing counter arguments to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear"
argument, in fact it is counterproductive, because it values the most
important argument of all with zero weight. Further it just prompts people to
come up with "solutions" that address the lower level issues and still leave
us with our biological sense of privacy invasion.

~~~
shantanubala
I'd be careful not to attribute unexplained aspects of our desires and
behavior to biology alone. A lot of it can be a _social_ construction. If
you're used to having your privacy regularly invaded from a very young age,
it's possible that you won't have any "biological sense" of privacy invasion.

Does our intuitive sense of biology come from our genes, or our cultural value
of "personal space"? The fact that we have weird reactions to nudity and
social norms that prevent us from sharing the most intimate details of our
lives indicates that it may be a cultural thing.

Obviously, this just makes privacy invasion on a systematic level even more
ominous.

------
sunahsuh
If you care about provenance, as I do, let me save you some Googling:

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

Daniel J. Solove

George Washington University Law School

San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745, 2007

GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289

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

------
chacham15
My point of view is very simple: I believe in freedom of speech. If I feel
like someone is watching and trying to understand every word I write, I cannot
write freely for fear of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Hyperbole like
"I feel like killing my boss" is the first to go. The person I am speaking to
knows what I mean by my statements and I feel confident that he does. Having
someone listen in on my conversations would take away that feeling of freedom.
The law even has similar provisions: attorney-client privilege is only
applicable if the two people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

~~~
alan_cx
Not worried about a down vote here?

I wrote out a big old reply to this article, and canned it. I was worried
about a load of down votes. I didn't want to be judged badly by a decent
community. I was worried my opinion would be a downer or some how anti-
American / Capitalist / Western. So I self censored. And that's just a
hacker's news aggregation site.

Dunno what point Im trying to make, but were we ever really free to make out
true opinion's public? Who do we fear more; government or our peers?

~~~
chacham15
This is exactly the point that I was trying to make: when we write here, its
in public. We have the expectation to be judged for what we say. Could you
imagine if you had that feeling writing to your friends in private?

~~~
thibauts
Of course knowing we _could be_ observed has profound effects on our behavior.
I wonder if any studies show it.

This looks a lot like what religion can induce, and I would really like to see
what happens once you ask people to "confess".

I was about to say bad things about this all, but I won't. I'm not sure who's
listening in, and who knows who will, tomorrow...

~~~
dchichkov
I think there are some studies on the effect of surveillance on human
behavior. I've searched on google scholar, there are quite a few articles.

Here's an excerpt from one article, to give you a feel of such research: "in
relation to the telephone, one feels ‘a subject’ and thus able to control the
situation whereas, in relation to the camera, one is always ‘an object’. The
object of a camera is in the situation of being a potential victim, without
the opportunity to influence his or her own destiny. The object is forced to
trust in someone else. This is why surveillance raises contradictions: to be
placed in the position of a victim does not increase the feeling of being ‘in
control’, but rather the feeling of being ‘under control’. However, while
feelings of being under control may not be pleasant, they might still ensure
one’s feelings of safety.", from ‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance
and the changing nature of urban space, Hille Koskela, 2000.
[http://old.geog.psu.edu/courses/geog497b/Readings/Koskela.pd...](http://old.geog.psu.edu/courses/geog497b/Readings/Koskela.pdf)

I think there might be some empirical research as well.

------
dchichkov
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

― Benjamin Franklin

~~~
slowpoke
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
will find something in them which will hang him."

\- Cardinal Richelieu

------
Dove
I don't think this is a very strong piece.

The essay proceeds in three broad sections. In the first, he unpacks the "I've
got nothing to hide" argument into its strongest form, and does a fine job of
it. In the second, he talks about privacy as a concept, notes that it's
difficult to define, and instead enumerates a list of privacy-related
problems. In the final section, he tries to explain why the "I've got nothing
to hide" argument is flawed.

Except that I didn't come out of that last section feeling I'd encountered a
strong argument. It seemed like the author was waving his hands and saying,
"There's a strong argument over this way -- it's Kafkaesque, not Orwellian!"
But I never did encounter it.

That's a shame. I was sort of hoping he'd go through his list of potential
problems, and talk about how each could become an _actual_ problem.

The best argument I saw was that the accumulation of information represents
power over the individual. I might put it like this: The more information the
government has about you, the greater the chance you and an ill-considered law
or policy will have an unfortunate encounter in the future.

I still think that deserves a bit more unpacking, though.

------
munin
there's something that frustrates me about arguments like this.

I think that technology is inescapably taking us towards a future where anyone
and everyone can record everything that any individual does, perpetually, and
at arbitrary scale. In many ways we are already there, especially in certain
domains (gmail, facebook, cell phones, creep shots, etc). It sounds
pessimistic to say "this is inevitable" and I'm sure many people (myself
included!) want that to be wrong, but given the technology we produce and the
limited degree of control we have over its use, I don't see any alternative.

So the present and future allow for democratized mass surveillance, never mind
what your government can do. What is our societal response? Make this illegal?
I doubt the effectiveness of that, both against the common man / criminal and
also against the government. If you are already terrified that the government
will break any of its own laws to watch you (and perhaps this terror is
justified), then how would the government passing laws limiting its own
abilities allay any of your fears? I don't see how it would.

I'm then annoyed because we seem to be standing on the deck of the Titanic
wishing virulently that water wasn't wet. This is the future, and it's coming,
and the government will have these records, and private companies will have
these records, and countless individuals will have these records. What are we
meaningfully going to do? Pass laws? Are we simply going to will back the
clock to when this wasn't possible? Or should we instead start to talk about
what this future, recorded, society will look like?

I welcome an effective "call to action" response to turn back the tide of mass
surveillance...

~~~
dchichkov
A question. Can a mass surveillance system be designed in a such way, so it
doesn't take away privacy or reduce civil liberties?

If the answer is no, then it is simple. It should be illegal to spend tax
money on such mass surveillance systems.

~~~
OmegaHN
Yes it can, as it has been done before with the police system. You have a
group of people watching society and reporting any criminal activity. It just
so happens that the response system is already built in. Police don't go into
private homes or search belongings without due process.

It should be quite easy to design a system in that way. Cameras and other
surveillance tools can only be placed in public places; this will protect
civil liberties while still enabling the government to better distribute
justice. In effect, they will place a policeman on every street corner.

~~~
dchichkov
I'm not so sure. To play a devil's advocate, even cameras in public places, if
combined with some data mining can invade privacy pretty badly. Say, resulting
in continuous tracking.

------
tnash
I think the most powerful argument here is that just because one may think
that they have nothing to hide, and they don't mind "having their picture
taken naked and distributed to their neighbors" doesn't mean that they should
enforce their beliefs on others.

~~~
msellout
That goes both ways. Just because one wants to keep secrets doesn't mean you
should stop someone else who wants to know everything.

To make the case for who is wrongly imposing their will, we need need a
framework for measuring goodness. The author goes in that direction, talking
about measuring the societal benefits of privacy and the systemic harms that
privacy protects against.

However, the "secondary use" harm wasn't very compelling. Contract law seems
to be the proper way to handle that, rather than privacy.

A better argument was that privacy protects free thought. Unfortunately, he
mentioned it too briefly and didn't discuss the conflict of free speech and
privacy in enough detail. Perhaps there wasn't enough space, but I think more
explanation of how privacy expands "the range of viewpoints being expressed
and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity." After
all, those viewpoints are of little value to society before they are shared
widely. One could argue that it's not privacy that is important, but
protection against retaliation.

~~~
dredmorbius
False dichotomy.

The reverse of keeping secrets (asserting your right to privacy) isn't
allowing others full snoop powers (denying your right to privacy), but
allowing another to practice full disclosure (asserting their right to freely
reveal all).

------
ChuckMcM
That is a pretty good write up. I really like the point that 'privacy is only
a desire to hide wrong things' when in fact it is a basic personal security
issue.

------
onoj
A simple concern on this topic: When my day to day life is public online:
a)strangers know when I am on vacation and my house is empty b) given the
standard misunderstandings amongst people - what they can check about what I
am doing via online tools and it differs from what they expect - and they
never have to let me know they know (a seed for massive misunderstandings)

Both a and b open my life to problems out of my control. Irrelevant of the
life I am living. Thus the need for privacy.

------
diminoten
Privacy, or a lack of it, requires an additional failure (corruption, or
ignorance) to become a problem.

So it's not privacy, it's ignorance and corruption we should fight
for/against.

~~~
dredmorbius
And yet, perfection in knowledge or execution of duties are impossible, so
corruption and ignorance are givens.

~~~
diminoten
Corruption isn't.

------
clicks
Direct pdf link: <http://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/courses/pet/F07/cache/solove.pdf>

------
clicks
Also worth reading is a piece titled "Conceptualizing Privacy" by the same
author, available here:
[http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol9...](http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol90/iss4/2/)

------
teeja
I see no reason to come up with examples apart from the US Gov's response to
the massive Wikileaks cable publication. Ignore for a moment that some of the
'secrets' were about illegalities, and recognize that the US Gov has things it
NEEDS to hide.

We all do, and anyone who says "if you have nothing..." is clearly naive about
life. Back when the first teletype BBS's appeared, I pimped for having no
passwords and a wide-open system. My plea was met with complete silence, and
subsequently life schooled me in the whys and wherefores and wisdom of that
silence. The first thing to know is: not everybody is your friend.

------
Tichy
I am already to enter arguments about religion online. Who knows what the
fanatics are capable of.

I guess it should be possible to communicate anonymously for similar reasons
as voting should be done anonymously.

------
thirdtruck
I haven't quite figured out how the hyperbolic "I've got nothing to hide" gets
past the issue of account passwords.

Even if we assume a new "real name only" global system of online identities,
that would still require that false testimony or simple errors _never_ get
attached to such identities.

------
flipstewart
I value my privacy, so I do not have a Google account, and I cannot read this
write up.

~~~
throwaway64
You do not receive the Google Docs login prompt if your browser is not logged
into Google at all.

You do, however, receive the login prompt if your browser is logged in through
another Google service (like search). Check to make sure nobody has you logged
into Google search or something.

This sort of half logged in status is very annoying.

------
thirdtruck
Did you know that you can get in trouble for lending a CD in the UK, which
lacks the fair use laws found in the US?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4960226>

------
vy8vWJlco
"McCarthyism"... Thank's Joseph McCarthy, for giving us a word for it.

------
cavilling_elite
He has a book out: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0300172311>

Giving to my father for Christmas. He is in the "nothing to hide" camp.

~~~
Kiro
I'm also in that camp and certainly hope no-one gives me that (or any other
political propaganda) for Christmas. Why can't you just accept your father's
opinion instead?

~~~
slowpoke
The bad thing about the "nothing to hide" camp usually isn't their opinion
that _they themselves_ have nothing to hide, but the fact that the majority of
these people seem to want to force this opinion on the rest of society. Fine,
live your rose-colored post-privacy life. But _leave me the fuck out of it_. I
have things to hide. Everyone has. You included.

~~~
Kiro
You're exaggerating.

~~~
thirdtruck
We look forward to seeing all of your account passwords posted in the next
comment, then. I would recommend starting with your Hacker News account.

~~~
Kiro
Irrelevant comparison.

------
ajb
It's ironic that this article is on google docs, which means I have to declare
my identity by logging in to google in order to read it.

~~~
vacri
I was able to read it just fine in a browser (IE) in which I've never logged
into anything and only use for testing statements like this.

~~~
ajb
Most people would not be able to do that.

------
clobber
Thread on reddit /r/privacy where they tried to summarize the "I've got
nothing to hide" paper and argument:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/10sui8/tldr_for_ive...](http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/10sui8/tldr_for_ive_got_nothing_to_hide_paper/)

