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Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

write.privacytools.io

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Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#11

Post by DoubleGlazing »

bad_alloc wrote: post #4

Whenever somebody argues having nothing to hide I ask: 1) Where were you last night? 2) How much money is in your bank account? Do you have any debt? 3) What is your Debit Card PIN/account password/... 4) What is your address? Your families address? 5) Can I see your key? And so on. Everybody needs to proctect themselves and potentially others attached to them. There is a good reason for these questions being awkward…

I like to counter the "If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" argument with...

"If I have done nothing wrong, then no one has the need to take an interest in my personal affairs."

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#12

Post by plaxitogrip »

bad_alloc wrote: post #4

Whenever somebody argues having nothing to hide I ask: 1) Where were you last night? 2) How much money is in your bank account? Do you have any debt? 3) What is your Debit Card PIN/account password/... 4) What is your address? Your families address? 5) Can I see your key? And so on. Everybody needs to proctect themselves and potentially others attached to them. There is a good reason for these questions being awkward…

Right. And one notices that such people already implicitly value privacy since they talk to their husband or wife or close friend very differently depending upon whether others are present.

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#13

Post by arvindamirtaa »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #11
bad_alloc wrote: post #4

Whenever somebody argues having nothing to hide I ask: 1) Where were you last night? 2) How much money is in your bank account? Do you have any debt? 3) What is your Debit Card PIN/account password/... 4) What is your address? Your families address? 5) Can I see your key? And so on. Everybody needs to proctect themselves and potentially others attached to them. There is a good reason for these questions being awkward…

I like to counter the "If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" argument with... "If I have done nothing wrong, then no one has the need to take an interest in my personal affairs."

Sarcasm ahead

But we don't know that you have done nothing wrong. Why don't we just take a quick peek and we'll leave you alone until we randomly decide to do this pointless exercise again?

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#14

Post by mark_l_watson »

Some people act like the war on corporate (and government) surveillance capitalism is lost.

I think that is the wrong attitude. Create friction by whatever means fit with your life style and work flow.

I do simple things like delete all cookies in all of my devices at least once a week, use the Duck Duck Go browser on iOS and iPadOS (I only use laptops for coding so I just use Safari and Firefox on my Mac and Linux laptops), disable location tracking as much as possible, and I use ProtonMail and Proton Calendar.

As someone once said, if you have nothing to hide, then you don’t have a life.

Personally, I believe that surveillance capitalism, with creeping neoliberalism and neoconservativism pose an existential threat to any semblance of democracy. Maybe democracy is a lost cause? I don’t believe it, and I am willing to put up some fight to at least try to preserve it.

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#15

Post by tolbish »

inanutshellus wrote: post #9

I really like Social Cooling's take on privacy ( http://www.socialcooling.com/ ). SC's take (paraphrasingly, of course) is that without privacy, you're only rewarded for astroturfing your life & feigning a blandly successful life without pot holes. The Social Dilemma (Netflix docudrama)'s take on it -- that facebook-et-al don't sell "your data" they sell "a guaranteed change in your behavior" -- is also a pretty damn…

I do not think it is a given that the general public feels powerless about privacy.

Why would someone take steps to empower themselves if they see no need for such power?

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#16

Post by _iyig »

>Our privacy is eroding. [...] The war is not lost, however.

Steven Rambam would probably disagree. He's a private investigator who's given many excellent talks on privacy at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js&t=10m20s

He goes into exquisite detail on the ways in which private info is shared, sold, amalgamated, and analyzed by private and public entities, and how law enforcement uses (and abuses) these resources. That particular talk is from 2016, so things are probably even worse now.

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#17

Post by jmnicolas »

bad_alloc wrote: post #4

Whenever somebody argues having nothing to hide I ask: 1) Where were you last night? 2) How much money is in your bank account? Do you have any debt? 3) What is your Debit Card PIN/account password/... 4) What is your address? Your families address? 5) Can I see your key? And so on. Everybody needs to proctect themselves and potentially others attached to them. There is a good reason for these questions being awkward…

As seen in a recent comment here, you might add:

6) Let the toilets door open, after all we all know what you're going to do there.

Re: Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

#19

Post by Blikkentrekker »

Many a man that says he cares about privacy also doesn't really care, to be honest.

One thing that has always irked me is the carelessness by which a man may give out, and is expected to give out, his full name.

Almost everyone has accepted that this is a bad idea on the internet, but in corporal social interaction full names are given out as if they be blowjobs, and so much information can be uncovered from a man's name.

It needs some serious revisiting and consideration how this works and I think in today's modern æra we probably need to do away with a single unified name for all purposes and allow citizens to operate under pseudonyms depending on the setting, at a minimum to keep one's professional and social life more separate.

Another issue is visible faces in public. My jurisidiction on the eve of the corona pandemic actually passed a lot to ban full-face covering, worded neutrally, but everyone knew it was about certain Islāmic garments. Supposedly it was necessary that every citizen's face be publicly recognizable, yet now we all cover it with masks to no problem whatsoever.

Even without a pandemic, a man should have the right to obscure his face in public and be unrecognizable for whatever reason he might desire.

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