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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

#51

Post by heisenbit »

sjducb wrote: post #42

When people say they have nothing to hide I like to remind them about fraud and criminals. All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters. Fraudsters often get their hands on government data through breeches and bribery. Also fraudsters pretend to be government agents to get data from big tech companies. So any channel that governments use to get data from tech companies is abused by frauds…

You don‘t need fraudsters just a run of the mill bully is enough. I remember a phase in my life where I had to do some high visibility reporting. I showed all underlying facts, methodology and conclusions and every week the bully tore into a minor detail devaluing my work and distracting from vital tasks. Only when I started shielding data and my reasoning as private and just delivering high level summary results I was able to put an end to it.

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

#52

Post by shrubby »

shrubby wrote: post #32

I 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 reasonin…

I was meaning to write complicit but complacent autocorrupt fits surprisingly well.

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

#53

Post by coldtea »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #40
nkrisc wrote: post #31

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.

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.

This can be read as if IBM did this unknowingly and only before WW2.

But IBM knew what they were assisting with, and even pre-WW2 was already assisting the Nazi regime of 1933-1939. And they didn't stop come WW2, if anything IBM opened new subsidiaries and continued throughout the second world war.

"(...) IBM leased, rather than sold, its machines. The company retained control of punch-card supply and provided service through subsidiaries. Each set of cards was custom-designed to Nazi requirements. He later wrote that the IBM headquarters in New York oversaw these arrangements through subsidiaries across Europe"

"(...) IBM New York created a subsidiary in Poland, Watson Business Machines, after the 1939 invasion. The firm managed railway traffic in the General Government and ran a punch-card printing shop near the Warsaw Ghetto. He stated that this subsidiary reported through Geneva to IBM New York, and revenues were transferred accordingly."

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

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

#54

Post by blaze33 »

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 nothing to hide, you'll have nothing to fear".

And later on we start to see the current form of the argument related to privacy, except now this argument is never directly used to erode it. It will always be in some form of "ok now we have to do this collective thing because of criminals, because of terrorism, because of protect the children, etc.". If you search "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" 100% of the results are about how it is a logical fallacy, nobody at all seems to defend the argument and yet, here we are!

Food for thought:

- this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)

- many governments, organizations and in any case the people in position of power and authority can develop a god complex (power corrupts etc.)

So unless I end up dealing with an all-loving and all-forgiving entity I could fully trust, I'd like to keep my right to privacy, thank you very much!

[1] https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Sermons_on_the_Spiritual...

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

#57

Post by estearum »

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…

Just because you don't see it written verbatim "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" doesn't mean it's not the argument being made.

Right now you have half the country downright giddy about federal agents terrorizing broad swaths of Americans, driving recklessly down their freeways, waving guns around their neighborhoods, bodyslamming random passersby, all fundamentally because half the country believes the only reason someone could not be giddy about this is because they "have something to hide."

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

#59

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

heisenbit wrote: post #51
sjducb wrote: post #42

When people say they have nothing to hide I like to remind them about fraud and criminals. All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters. Fraudsters often get their hands on government data through breeches and bribery. Also fraudsters pretend to be government agents to get data from big tech companies. So any channel that governments use to get data from tech companies is abused by frauds…

You don‘t need fraudsters just a run of the mill bully is enough. I remember a phase in my life where I had to do some high visibility reporting. I showed all underlying facts, methodology and conclusions and every week the bully tore into a minor detail devaluing my work and distracting from vital tasks. Only when I started shielding data and my reasoning as private and just delivering high level summary results I w…

Not wishing to join the bully's side, but I think making something private to prevent discussion/criticism has a bad smell about it. It's possible (to someone who knows neither you nor the bully) that the bully had some valid suggestions and that you became over defensive in allowing that to become a distraction rather than saying something like "okay, but can you make these suggestions after the meeting and we can work through them later".

Personally, I don't like the idea of someone hiding data and methodology just because of not wanting feedback.

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

#60

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #48
codethief wrote: post #24

To 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 prefer short and snarky "then drop your pants". Shuts up most.

Maybe "give me your bank PIN" for those that have been waiting for an excuse to drop their pants.
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