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The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

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Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#131

Post by LexiMax »

DalekBaldwin wrote: post #107
blaze33 wrote: post #54

Ok so this "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is so recurrent I once went looking where it came from. The oldest account I found is in a religious book from 1832 [1]: "We must have nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but, and this is the important bit, this is in the context of your relationship with Christ. Later accounts are mostly from judicial documents like "well tell us what happened, if you have nothin…

Right, I don't think I've ever actually seen anybody make the "nothing to hide" argument. Maybe it was used more commonly in the past, but I only ever see people pre-emptively attack it without prompting. It seems to be a special case of a straw-man argument: a no-man argument. It's not the only such example, but it seems to appear without fail in the top comments in any discussion of privacy issues.

I found somebody making this argument just the other day on Hacker News in regard to license plate tracking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46250556

> In practice I'm not even getting "tracked". No one is likely to be looking up my license plate and looking at my movements, because I don't do anything that would warrant that kind of attention

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#132

Post by robhlt »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #121
robhlt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these are not good responses and are easily discounted by most people ("I don't take nude photos"/"I never tell anyone my pin"). Average people see zero equivalence between sending nudes or their bank pin to a specific stranger and Google keeping a record of every website they've ever visited.

Surely the "I never tell anyone my pin" is just an admission that they do have something to hide? The point is that there are many things that should be kept private/secret and often the need for that secrecy isn't obvious to people who have never been in particular situations. A woman trying to escape from an abusive relationship may need to keep her location secret to avoid being murdered by her ex, but your typica…

I understand the point, but you're taking their statement "I have nothing to hide" way too literally, and these sorts of arguments based on literal interpretations rarely convince anyone. Has anyone actually ever been convinced to take privacy more seriously by this "insight"?

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#133

Post by throwaway290 »

mindslight wrote: post #130
throwaway290 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that comment before it was flagged and thanks to that I now have this argument that you supplied. if I arrived a couple minutes later I wouldn't know it. (I browsed logged out) I disagree with that guy but I don't know it should be flagged

The HN dead dynamic has been increasingly throwing babies out with the bathwater, and logging in (even to a throwaway account) with showdead=yes is the right call these days. But for this particular comment, I assume it was flagged because at this point continuing to cheerlead for the fascists/destructionists with nonsense talking points is just basic flamebait. As GP said, the assertion that only illegal immigrants…

This is not basic flamebait. if you have any serious conversation outside of your political bubble this is THE argument that people who get deported are never US citizens. and it is a valid argument unless you can find examples of citizens deported. I can't

there are so many shorts of right wing "influencers" cornering liberals who can't give a suitable reply to this question.

so the argument about hearings is important. and killing this discussion took it away from public. this of course is very useful to the maga machine which is so friendly to big tech so I'm not surprised.

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#134

Post by mindslight »

throwaway290 wrote: post #133
mindslight wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN dead dynamic has been increasingly throwing babies out with the bathwater, and logging in (even to a throwaway account) with showdead=yes is the right call these days. But for this particular comment, I assume it was flagged because at this point continuing to cheerlead for the fascists/destructionists with nonsense talking points is just basic flamebait. As GP said, the assertion that only illegal immigrants…

This is not basic flamebait. if you have any serious conversation outside of your political bubble this is THE argument that people who get deported are never US citizens. and it is a valid argument unless you can find examples of citizens deported. I can't there are so many shorts of right wing "influencers" cornering liberals who can't give a suitable reply to this question. so the argument about hearings is import…

> THE argument that people who get deported are never US citizens. and it is a valid argument unless you can find examples of citizens deported (I can't).

It might be a valid argument in a dictatorship, but not in the US - rather it's hopeium that completely relies on preconceived assumptions. An assertion that everyone deported/disappeared must be a non-citizen (... because otherwise why would they have been deported?) is bog standard fallacy that the government/computer/bureaucracy] is always correct.

The entire foundation of Constitutionally limited government responsible to the People is that it is the government's job to justify its actions. That's the goal of open legal process, professional representation, the incarcerated's communication with the outside world, etc. A strongman wannabe-dictator asserting "trust me" but hiding all of the details, and for what we do know about engaging in wanton criminality, is nowhere near any level of good-faith executing the laws of a Constitutionally-limited government.

Personally I'd say people still thinking any of this is about "immigration reform" are being taken for a ride, just as they have been for the past thirty years.

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#135

Post by Terr_ »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #69
billy99k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Regardless of the legality (which I can’t comment on being on the other side of the pond) - masked anonymous people snatching people from the street and disappearing them in unmarked vehicles sounds A LOT like what the nazi party did in my country. I know it’s a tired trope by this point but the parallels are definitely there. And you know how the saying goes: first they came for xyz, by the time they came for me nob…

In terms of armoring the argument, I try to add a time component: "That's exactly what the Nazis in $YEAR."

Granted, this won't work on people who don't know or care about history, but that was probably a lost cause anyway.

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#136

Post by Terr_ »

goku12 wrote: post #74
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #28

> We must all become deviations Already there friend. I feel that I have nothing to hide, but I do my darnedest to ensure that it costs a maximal amount of time and effort to find that out. If a random stranger (law enforcement or otherwise) wants to know shit about me, then I'm immediately creeped out and the last thing I want to do is make (online) stalking of me an easy task. The harder it is, the more likely they…

> I feel that I have nothing to hide Though you made the right determination later on, this is what you need to correct first. You don't have to be a murderer to have something to hide. Everyone does, no matter how innocent you are. Imagine that you're a young girl. Is it safe to expose the GPS tracks of your daily commutes? Let's cut to the other end of the spectrum. Imagine that you're the chief of a law enforcemen…

Perhaps: "I'm not yet aware of the current and future forces I will have a desperate and very-moral reason to hide from."

Something to hide often occurs retroactively, when evil people gain power today they didn't have yesterday.

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#137

Post by scoofy »

faidit wrote: post #103
rpdillon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it sounds like contempt and anger, which is why I suspect the author used those words.

Look up the definition of "hate". How is "cold, hard anger" like one might feel toward a N*zi collaborator not adjacent to that? Why quibble over this?

Geez, what an insane semantic debate. The author clearly has strong, negative emotions towards the people this article is about. Folks who want to nitpick the technicality of these terms are just misunderstanding how language works.

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#138

Post by scoofy »

I think there is an error of omission in the article. Organized crime syndicates can inflict harm just as well as a corrupted government can, and usually with less recourse. To advocate total privacy for everyone has nontrivial costs in addition to the nontrivial benefits.

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#139

Post by Wowfunhappy »

nkrisc wrote: post #34
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all The article opens with: >> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." Which isn't literally saying "I hate them" but I'm not sure how else to interpret "a special kind of contempt." Regardless, I've edited my original post.

Why not interpret contempt as “contempt”, which is not “hate”?

I didn't do it consciously. When I wrote my original post, I'd hallucinated that the author had used the term "hate".

When Advael responded "the author doesn't mention hating these people at all", I went back to the article and checked. Advael was right, but I can understand where my hallucination came from. The first three sentences read:

> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator.

A "special kind of contempt" mixed with "cold, hard anger" really seems like hatred to me.

(Anyway, this really isn't the point I was trying to make.)

Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

#140

Post by Nasrudith »

The best argument in my opinion against "nothing to hide" is that you don't get to decide that. The accuser does. If that doesn't scare you then you didn't think it through fully.

A change in regieme is a downright terrifying variant of Pascal's Wager - where you are judged for heresies against ideologies that were obscure or didn't even exist yet.

The Khmer Rogue made being an intellectual or wearing glasses something to hide. All sorts of absurd ideological hypotheticals become terrifying.

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