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‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

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Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#131

Post by ekianjo »

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #119
version_five wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two separate issues here. Privacy should be a right, I agree. But also we shouldn't tolerate our countries becoming authoritarian police states. It's already happened in the UK early, Australia and Canada are well on the way, and the US isn't far behind. Good privacy as a substitute for a government that isn't batshit crazy is not going to work in any event. Advocate privacy, but also advocate not letting giv…

I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious. Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system…

If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance?

Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be.

If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#132

Post by ekianjo »

chii wrote: post #120
deepthunder wrote: post #10

The problem with the "I've got nothing to hide" argument is it's not "you" who decides what is "right" or "wrong". The entity doing the "spying" determines what is right or wrong. "You" might think "x" is ok, however the "spying" entity may have the opposite view. And it is the "spying" entity's opinion that matters, not yours, because it always them that have the power and authority in determining what is "right" or…

I will always counter it with "If you got nothing to hide, then why do you close the door when you're in the toilet?".

Or ask them to unlock their phones and let you browse everything including their banking app.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#133

Post by ekianjo »

civilitty wrote: post #83
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that makes what difference exactly...?

They’re still doing it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Germany

And this is a way you contribute some of your taxes to your religious affiliation

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#135

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

ekianjo wrote: post #131
bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious. Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system…

If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance? Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be. If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.

We don’t really have it in the way people in the US and those places influenced by their perception have come to believe. My experience is that US people tend to think that the police can follow you all over the place in real time using cameras. They cannot. They might be able to get the legal right to CCTV footage of all sorts of cameras but they will have to have the paperwork and knock on doors, not unlike the way they could in the USA. This is regulated by law.

Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state

Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture.

So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate.

I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#136

Post by devjab »

deepthunder wrote: post #10

The problem with the "I've got nothing to hide" argument is it's not "you" who decides what is "right" or "wrong". The entity doing the "spying" determines what is right or wrong. "You" might think "x" is ok, however the "spying" entity may have the opposite view. And it is the "spying" entity's opinion that matters, not yours, because it always them that have the power and authority in determining what is "right" or…

I loved how the writers of that Netflix movie about a hacker put it as “I have nothing I want to show you”.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#137

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #95

In the 1970s, Iran looked similar to many Western cultures: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=iran+1970s&qs=MM&form=Q... That changed literally overnight in 1979. In the US, we had McCarthyism. Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[81] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other co…

The HUAC wasn’t McCarthy, of course; they are just sort of bound up in the same Red Scare history. It is routine for people outside the USA to conflate these things because of how they are presented in dramatisations; as a Brit I didn’t realise until recently.

McCarthy might have been a pivotal figure in McCarthyism (obviously ;-) but he had nothing directly to do with the HUAC because he was a senator.

He sat on what is now the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It was the Senate Committee on Government Operations then, which had an enormously broad remit and gave him his ability to harass and persecute anyone who worked for the US federal government. He was also more able to resist pressure because of it.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#138

Post by renegat0x0 »

The problem with 'I have nothing to hide' is that it creates a system where everybody has to abide. Everybody needs to be transparent. Everybody's data are exposed to a third party via network effect. It is not essential that Google, or government has my data. It has my friend's data, my techears, my psychologist, my president, my boss data, my wifes data. The third party might use it correctly, but then they can sell it to somebody, to a greedy corporation, to other branches of government. I see a very big potential for abuse.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#139

Post by NovaDudely »

pixl97 wrote: post #106
matheusmoreira wrote: post #96

It's so tiresome having to argue with the exact same "retorts" over and over again. It's like they do it on purpose to wear down people's willingness to resist. It's such a fundamentally thoughtless statement. In every single case, there's a 100% chance the person does have quite a lot of things that they do actively hide, they just haven't thought it through.

Privacy and politics are like this. If you ever hear someone say "I am non-political" they are a broken shell of a human. Everyone gets political when their state starts making demands of them.

I saw that on youtube once I saw something that is this idea flipped on its head. It was two folks, one of them was trying to talk to the other about politics, the other just shoots him down straight away.

Said something like "I was sent to Vietnam war when I was just 16, nobody should ever had to go through that. All because of politicians. Since then I don't want anything to do with politics!". They became apolitical because politics directly broke them.

In that situation, I get it. They had been through hell, as far as they are concerned they just want to be left in peace. But as you said, when the state starts forcing their ways on others, that situation of none committal generally goes out the window lest you be trampled.

Re: ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

#140

Post by quickthrower2 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #77
chacham15 wrote: post #45

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 o…

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