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Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

robindoherty.com

11–20 of 329 posts

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#12

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

I think your opinion is valid and should be fairly represented, but consider that your reasons for not caring about privacy may be flawed or inconsistent.

Assuming that you don't care about privacy because you're apathetic, do you also not care about free speech because you don't say anything controversial? Do you care about your right to assembly even if you don't protest anything? As an extreme example upon which to build a baseline, would you mind if a neighbor had unmitigated access to watching you lounge in your underwear, take a shower or have sex?

Why do you not care about privacy? Do you feel that you don't need it because you have nothing to hide, or are you willing to sacrifice it for some greater good (e.g. terrorism etc.)? Are you merely indifferent or do you aggressively oppose the concept?

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#13

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

Do you have curtains in your house?

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#14

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

I think you mean "I don't care about my privacy at this moment". These are very different ideas. Or would you not care about your privacy if you visited a country where reading HN content was illegal? Or would you not care about the privacy of someone denouncing some government wrong doing? Or if someone started harassing you because of the things they found out you're doing?

There are plenty of cases where privacy are important, even if you think they don't currently apply to you.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#15

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

What about the impacts of all all-knowing government in the future?

10 years from now a new government is voted in, and they severely dislike people with your political views based on some online comments you made in 2016. They could do anything from just making it really hard for you to vote, all the way to getting you fired, pulling your mortgage out from under you, etc. etc.

You really have no idea what a future government or corporation will do with so much data about you. Based on history, I think it's best to assume it won't be good for you.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#16
This issue always boils down to the LOTR argument for me: the surveillance power is too great, and no individual or group can or should be trusted with it, regardless of its actual current or potential future benefits.

The crux of the debate then is where to draw the line between safe and unsafe amounts of power?

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#17

Many would trade their privacy for what they think is safety.

Many have done things that were common place in the past and are not anymore; or are plain illegal; or were found to be wrong. Sustaining something just because many people still do it doesn't really seem reasonable.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is a defeatist attitude, I think, and there is plenty of evidence that Evil can be stopped/averted in many cases. It's beyond obvious that there is no complete solution for Evil, but if you keep ignoring this question/problem, then people will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option over your "Evil/privacy" alternative, which is ultimately devastating to everyone. We need to talk about how to create "n…

I'm really curious what you think evil is since you keep capitalizing and speaking of it as some spiritual essence that can be eradicated. You have not established the slightest bit of an operational definition, and resort to pathologizing neutral transmission channels as hosts of "Evil". This is a complete non-starter and not worthwhile to deliberate. "Evil uses Tor" is as useful as "Evil uses paper".

Maybe not worthwhile for you, but there's a set of people out there who all agree on what Evil actually is (generally, obviously it's difficult to be exact), and we'd like to try and figure out how to limit its ability to act, while maintaining the shield of protection for the persecuted.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#19

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

The part i hate is the asymmetry. I don't really care if people know where i am.

In the naive sense, there is a lot of value in knowing location. Restraining orders, for example, could become effective. "How did your cell phone get to the bank that was robbed if you weren't there?" stuff like that. Furthermore, politicians pander. being able to answer how many people showed up for that protest is valuable. what were their demographics? Perhaps this is an issue that matters.

But the asymmetry is horrible. You want real time access to my location? ok, but make the location public for the police. and NSA employees. and senators. Having a record, that's made public after a few weeks or months seems pretty reasonable to me. Having a record that's secret and controlled by a handful of powerful people, which is what i think we have now, is much more frightening.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#20

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

Mind posting your medical records and tax returns? Once we see them, we can let you know what else we would like to see.
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