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The simplest retort I've heard to "I have nothing to hide" is "then send me a nude photo of yourself." Theres nothing wrong with nude bodies, but it is definitely private. I.e. privacy has nothing to do with hiding wrong/illegal things.

(obligatory disclaimer: a little inaccuracy saves a lot of explanation, but I think this gets the gist across)




The article addresses that exact retort, and others in the same style. Here is what it says.

> Such responses only attack the nothing to hide argument in its most extreme form, which is not particularly strong.

The article is way more nuanced, it makes a point in attacking the real argument and not the strawman. Framing the debate into a privacy/security tradeoff.

And btw, my naked body ranks pretty low in the list of things I want to hide. I just don't walk around naked in public because most people wouldn't want me to, it may even be illegal. It is interesting however how a government that says you should have nothing to hide when it comes to surveillance also says that naked bodies must stay hidden.


The most private part of your body is often not covered anyway. Your fingerprint.


In that perspective one could also mention that humans constantly keep discarding things that can possibly uniqeuely identify them: dna.


Or iris.

And then there's the people whose minds are so open their brains are falling out ... ;-)


My version is "I have nothing to hide, but I still lock the door when going to the toilet". While I get the point of your retort, I find it can make people defensive and often derails the conversation because it can be interpreted as a gotcha. But that kind of reaction is proof enough that people value privacy. It's just that they don't necessarily think of privacy in their home as the same thing as digital privacy.

I'm happy people are more aware about privacy issues and talk about it, everyone and everthing has been mindlessly collecting data for too long, but it looks like things are finally moving in a slightly better direction. At least one can hope :)


The easiest response to this is that I can be OK with a limited audience seeing private information about me in service of higher goals without assenting to unnecessary widespread distribution of the same material.

For example, my doctor can look at my genitals any time he needs to, even if I don't want you to see them.

There's no contradiction here.


My version of this is “Just go ahead and send me your browser history, I’ll wait.”


Tbh most people who use Chrome already send it to Google. The ISP can only see the domain name. Google can see the full url. But it's so convenient to sync browsing history between multiple devices, apparently.


This is probably true, but I’d bet the ‘nothing to hide’ crowd don’t know it.


Sure, where should I send it?




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