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

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

#21

Post by opo »

x5n1 wrote: post #5

Privacy is less important than the ability to trust your government won't do blatantly illegal things like put innocent people behind bars, steal their money or property, when they actually know that they are innocent. The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules. I don't live in the US, but the stuff the government whether local, state, or federal ge…

>...The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules.

Isn't that the problem with all governments? Like they say "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”

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

#23

Post by baddox »

blitzprog wrote: post #11

"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.

From the perspective of political philosophy, I see no problem with you not caring about keeping your own personal information private. But that's very different than you proposing a government program that will forcefully prevent other people who do want to maintain control over their personal information from doing so.

To phrase it differently, in a world where individuals have perfect control over their personal information, so can still post any of your own personal information to the Internet if you want it to be public. It's basically the difference between saying "I'm not personally a Muslim" and "I think practicing Islam should be illegal."

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

#25

Post by nahname »

blitzprog wrote: post #11

"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.

Can I have access to your email account? I only want to read everything you don't care about protecting. Promise.

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

#26

Post by brandonmenc »

blitzprog wrote: post #11

"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.

Can I have access to your Senator's philandering text messages so that I can bribe them to make a vote you don't support?

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

#27

Post by CaptSpify »

grecy wrote: post #15
blitzprog wrote: post #11

"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 g…

And, I think it's important to point out: This isn't just a scary story to make people side with you. This actually happened, albeit before the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

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

#28

Post by enraged_camel »

blitzprog wrote: post #11

"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 personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should.

When late 19th century Germany started recording census data, a clerk made the suggestion that they should also record each person's religion. No one objected. What could be the harm, right? They were already collecting age, gender, occupation, etc. so they might as well collect one more thing.

Half a century later, the Nazis were able to use those same historical census records to identify whose grandparents were Jewish, and therefore who must be Jewish, which greatly aided in rounding up those people.

So imagine: a piece of information commonly believed to be harmless to reveal about oneself became the primary method that facilitated one of the greatest atrocities in human history.

The lesson here is that tomorrow's government may turn out to be very different than today's. Information you willingly reveal about yourself today, or don't mind others (such as the government) finding out about you, may be used against you, your children or their children.

That is why privacy is supremely important.

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

#29

Post by blitzprog »

dsacco wrote: post #12
blitzprog wrote: post #11

"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 t…

First of all thank you for respecting my opinion. I appreciate it.

1.) Free speech is a completely different topic. Snowden's quote on this page makes no sense to me no matter how often I re-read it. If free speech didn't exist I wouldn't be able to express my opinion about privacy :)

2.) Privacy means hiding the truth. Hiding what really happened. Hiding who you really are. I believe it is a flaw of the human personality that makes us want to hide information and eventually lie about it.

I don't care if Google or the government knows that I'm searching "[insert embarassing keywords for you here]" or if Facebook knows my location, or if Twitter knows what I like based on the people I follow.

Who is the government? It's people. People like you and me. If people decide to make assumptions based on data they collected and the assumptions aren't correct it's their own fault for assuming something in the first place (because...you know...it's an assumption...it can be wrong).

I am not aggressively opposing the concept of privacy. I respect other people's opinion.

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

#30

Post by NhanH »

blitzprog wrote: post #29
dsacco wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

First of all thank you for respecting my opinion. I appreciate it. 1.) Free speech is a completely different topic. Snowden's quote on this page makes no sense to me no matter how often I re-read it. If free speech didn't exist I wouldn't be able to express my opinion about privacy :) 2.) Privacy means hiding the truth. Hiding what really happened. Hiding who you really are. I believe it is a flaw of the human person…

> I believe it is a flaw of the human personality that makes us want to hide information and eventually lie about it.

At the very basic, we want to hide things because other people do not like it (which leads to reaction from shaming to prosecuting and stoning). Fundamentally, the only way for it to not happen is to have a completely homogeneous society, or all human to turn into saints. I will just assert the former to be bad, and the latter to be impossible .

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