What’s important to hide is always changing. So even if you have nothing to hide now, you may wish you had hidden it in the future.
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
#32I am trying to burn my bridges well enough not to be accepted to the clan of complacent narcissists.
I'm well aware of the possible and even unavoidable consequences of the current trajectory.
But this is a conscious decision to try to shape the norm so that the current dystopian zillionaire future would not happen fully.
My reasoning is most likely the humanely typical post-hoc rationalization and strategic reasoning, but I try to think good old MLK quote fits it.
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#33Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many moral frameworks, inconsistency isn't the only wrong someone can commit. The argument constructed in this article is essentially utilitarian, making the claim that the mechanisms of surveillance and privacy make this behavior harmful to others, regardless of their intentions or internal sense of morality. In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all, although I suppose that's not a completel…
> 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”?
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#35My "importance of privacy" story: I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind of dispute is that the bills give the serial numbers of the meters. The bill from Scottish Power gives the same meter serial numbers that are embossed on the front of my meters, and is theref…
This is a valid story and I’m sorry to hear that you went through this. However, it’s a strawman for the current argument from the blog post, which is that living life in the open and acting normal is setting things up for failure, and I don’t believe that it is.
Having nothing to hide is fine. Nothing to hide and doing nothing wrong is least likely to cause trouble.
The blog post’s argument that someone would be more likely to get watched if they start hiding after not hiding is not valid. ALL encrypted and unencrypted communication is a valid target for analysis, but ANY encrypted traffic is obviously more of a concern, just like one person walking into a store brandishing a gun is as alarming as 5 brandishing guns, and it doesn’t matter whether they used to not carry guns into the store.
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#36He's running for governor of California. He's apparently having trouble getting 6,000 signatures or $5000 to get on the ballot, so he's probably not a serious candidate.
> He's running for governor of California. He's apparently having trouble getting 6,000 signatures or $5000 to get on the ballot, so he's probably not a serious candidate.
The popular, well funded politicians haven't exactly served their constituents well in the privacy domain...
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#37My "importance of privacy" story: I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind of dispute is that the bills give the serial numbers of the meters. The bill from Scottish Power gives the same meter serial numbers that are embossed on the front of my meters, and is theref…
telco guy comes in at point x in past, takes a pic of your meters while you don't attend. privacy fucked. but obscuring stuff like that behind temper proof (mwemphasis on proof) the glitter?
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#38To anyone who says "I have nothing to hide" I respond with "Unfortunately, you are not the one who gets to decide whether what you have is worth hiding." (I think I first might have come across this beautifully succinct and unfortunately very true counter in a Reddit AMA with Edward Snowden way back when, but I might be misremembering.)
I was thinking a little about it lately. Not the saying itself, but the positioning to the general public. The annoying reality is that for most of the things that I consider important enough to voice discontent over ( and maybe even suppress need for convenience for ) are not always easy to 'present'. Note that it is not even always easy here either, but we do, by design, give one another a charitable read.
Hell, look at me, I care and I accepted some of it as price to pay for house peace.
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#39To anyone who says "I have nothing to hide" I respond with "Unfortunately, you are not the one who gets to decide whether what you have is worth hiding." (I think I first might have come across this beautifully succinct and unfortunately very true counter in a Reddit AMA with Edward Snowden way back when, but I might be misremembering.)
yeah, it's a cascade. maybe you are not a threat to gov or corp but locally there's people who are like the people in clubs who spike you because they want you out or because they want your girls or the girls you will steal from them. info can be power. rumors, gossip, your browsing history, what you draw, what you code in your free time, what you talk to your kids about, what they do with that when they visit "friends" who already had info that you decided wasn't worth hiding ... from your kids ...
all can and will be used to induce stress or to divert attention of the young ones.
governments used to build massive societies and create rules and order and kaizen infrastructures that would get us as far away from the dark ages as possible ... but here we are closing that gap again. Go VCs! Go Agents! Go Puppies of Wall Street! Go work for LLM companies instead of using those big capable brains of yours for something other than personalized copypastable copypastacopypasta ...
"the other girls and kids made it through, and so will you, just let it happen, let it be" and so it goes ...
Re: The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
#40What’s important to hide is always changing. So even if you have nothing to hide now, you may wish you had hidden it in the future.
Pre-WW2 census in Germany was conducted by IBM and included religion and other family origin related questions.
Fast forward a few years and the Nazi regime used census results to go after every family that was undesirable for them using the census data they bought from IBM.
Privacy and anonymity are not needed until they are desperately required.