In this much-discussed subject, I'm surprised that two huge points never arise:
1. The "if you have nothing to hide..." line is predicated on the viewer having final say about whether something is right/wrong, thus subordinating the subject to the viewer. This is repulsive to the notion of liberty as protected by the American "4th Amendment" right of freedom from governmental inspection without an adjudicated warrant. To wit: it's not that I have something to hide, it's that someone else is going to be obnoxious if they see it.
On a related but semantically distinct note...
2. Those pushing "if you have nothing to hide..." have suspect & ulterior motives. Their existence (income, job, power, prestige) depend on finding something "wrong". They are, by job description, hostile to me. If they derived nothing from inspecting others, they would not care whether anything was hidden or not. Remember: they seek the power to punish, not just what they find wrong, but what they cannot inspect. Your exposure nets you little, but gains them so much they want to reprimand you for any concealment.
I'm actually surprised that the 4th Amendment isn't referenced more frequently in refutation to the asinine "nothing to hide" position.
"Nothing to hide" is thematically similar to the groan-inducing "Do you want the terrorists to win?" arguments against civil liberties, in favor of increased security measures, proferred and popularly supported in the mid-2000s. (Sadly, many of the legacies and artifacts of that position still persist).
The answer to any of these half-baked arguments should always begin with something along the lines of "Because we're better than that." Because we have a constitution that assumes we're good people, and that protects our civil liberties from invasion. Because these things are so fundamental to our nation's purpose that giving them up is much worse than being attacked. Giving them up threatens the very purpose of the country's founding.
Even to entertain these arguments, i.e., by trying to cite examples of areas of privacy or liberty that are negotiable, areas that aren't, and so forth, is to stoop low. It is to lose before the argument has actually begun. It is to accept the faulty premise that privacy is about hiding something -- that it is an active attempt to conceal information from the world. No, privacy isn't the action being taken. Invasion of privacy is the action. Privacy is simply a state of being, and one to which we have an inalienable right.
Privacy isn't something we opt into; it is something we don't even really consider until we are made, or compelled, or asked to opt out. "Nothing to hide" begs the question. It assumes, as a foregone premise, that privacy is an opt-in decision that we consciously undertake in defense of something (and that something is implied to be onerous or illegal). This is just fallacious logic, plain and simple.
It's unfortunate that a right to privacy wasn't inumerated directly in the constitution, but was instead defined indirectly. This is one of those areas where the founders really couldn't have known how far technology would go, and how important something like privacy -- which may have been taken for granted back then -- would become 200+ years later.
Trivial example: a traditional suit-and-tie, senior manager walks by a junior programmer's cube and sees youtube on the monitor and immediately assumes junior is slacking off, abusing company resources. He subsequently spreads negative commentary about junior to his peers.
The problem is both senior's prejudices, AND the fact that he's missing context. Junior might be watching an instructional video. It might be a break after 10 hours straight work. He might be creating videos for the company and uploading them.
In other words, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean someone who looks is going to see the whole true picture.
Plus, if politicians have nothing to hide, why do they fight Wikileaks? Why don't they publish all administrative documents, accountancy books, meeting reports, etc? Those who push surveillance policies refuse to eat their own dog food. They're hypocrites.
The bigger problem with "nothing to hide" is that it implies that what currently qualifies as right or wrong will hold in the future.
And while people in the US like to take for granted that democracy inevitably marches towards freedom, that simply isn't always so.
There's no guarantee that what was once illegal or suitable grounds for harassment by the community and authorities won't become so again.
"Harmless" records of yourself enjoying alcohol, common recreational drugs, listening to certain brands of music, interacting with currently-legitimate political parties or activist groups -- all could one day be held against you and be found as grounds to have authorities and/or the wider community harass, arrest or otherwise sanction you.
1. Privacy and secrets are necessary because our society demands it. My identity is crucial for me to be able to borrow money, obtain a bank account, sign papers. I am therefore entitled to privacy to my own date of birth, mother's maiden name and a host of other so called "secrets".
2. Privacy also reduces the chance I will be discriminated against. If you've lived in a country where the law decides whether you are allowed to purchase land based on your religious beliefs, then you'd appreciate that the less people know about you, the less they can prejudge you.
3. Private conversations allow ideas to be discussed and discarded if they turn out to be wrong or worse still turn out to have ethical issues attached. If every thought are treated as a matter of public discourse that can be held against you in the future, then people will be keeping their mouth shut.
4. One only have to look at how "suspected symphatizers" were killed when South Vietnam fell, to understand that privacy allows people to keep their heads low, and should the environment turn nasty, to stay out of trouble.
"In this much-discussed subject, I'm surprised that two huge points never arise"
Actually those points come up in pretty much every book about privacy. Your first point is heavily discussed in Jeffrey Rosen's book The Unwanted Gaze, and your second point is sort of the point of Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear. See also any of Daniel Solove's books.
If someone knows something about you, he gains power over you.
This is the most fundamental reason I have seen yet, reflected (often unconsciously) in our daily lives: We have curtains, we talk in private, we have secrets we only tell to those we trust, have company confidentials, discretion, spokesmen, and don't negotiate our salaries in public.
Why? Because we instinctively try to minimize those who might take advantage over us.
Knowledge can be exploited in so many ways that it is very hard to tell if a certain piece of information is harmless or not. If you're at the mercy of someone else, depending on him not to exploit his knowledge over you, you lose freedom.
Most people at least feel this and therefore - in their social interactions - act accordingly.
Interestingly, as soon at no human face is involved, my observation is that these instincts break down. I believe that's the core issue today, where most information isn't collected by some creepy stalker, but by web services, governments and card readers. They seem so detached from a real (potentially threatening) person, that our deeply engrained secrecy patterns fail us.
This is an excellent point, but there is yet another subtler and more benign point of view.
Private information is valuable social currency which we use to measure and define the distance between ourselves and others. There are things that are only told to the significant other for instance. By knowing them she/he not only has more power on me but also rightly feels closer to me than anyone else.
When someone finds out such information about me - harmless or not - without my consent he/she positions him/herself too close to me and I feel justly violated. The same way someone may try to diminsh the distance by disclosing facts that are not told to a stranger, expecting me to reciprocate. But at least then I have the option to decline.
I think this is the core issue: wanting privacy is basically wanting to retain control of how close I let other people come, and controlling the amount of facts they know about me is the tool to define that distance. Stealing this valuable social currency does not differ that much from stealing any other type of currency.
> If someone knows something about you, he gains power over you.
I couldn't agree more. When I graduated from high school, coming from a small town, I wanted to get a college degree. Unfortunately, I had a low self-esteem and many friends and relatives that would belittle me or my goal. I don't know if they were jealous or I was such an underachiever in high school that it was hard for them to believe I could reach my goal. This really undermined my confidence and my ability to study, leading me to drop out more than once. Finally, I stopped hanging around that town, did not tell anyone about my plans except a few people, and cut off the relationships that put me down the most. Then I went back to college and it was a breeze. I'm not totally cynical, but I believe there are a lot of people out there that will use personal information to hurt you, and it's best to minimize what you tell others until you know who you can trust.
* In the 1930s being Japanese in the USA was perfectly legal. After 1942 it was not.
* Prior to 1947, Americans had freedom of association. Starting in 1947, numerous people were denied employment, and some were jailed ("Hollywood Ten") because of their association. This was a campaign of both government and corporate intimidation.
* Over the past decade or so, numerous people have been denied a certain amount of freedom of movement without any sort of due process because their names generated a match on the TSC's No Fly List.
Those are three very easy examples taken just from the USA. You could generate a much longer list with a bit more effort and expanding to other countries.
This speaks exactly to the general point I wanted to make: why should I put so much trust in the government? I'm not anti-gov by any means, but government is a large group of people, and among any large group, there are going to be some untrustworthy people, some liars, some stupid people, some irresponsible people, some committing crimes, some covering up crimes (which is just another crime)... And certainly, in government, there are going to be some people who have agendas, and some people who have only their interest or their small group's interests in mind.
So turning over everything to this large group, with all its power is... risky to say the least.
The number one reason for the government to create a comprehensive register of something is enable later legislation to ban it. We've seen this several times in Canada with firearms - first a law requiring registration of a certain class of firearms, and then once the government knows where they all are, a new piece of legislation requiring them to be surrendered.
The more information the government has, the more it enables future oppressive action.
I would also extend my distrust to corporations. While I don't have a ready-to-mind example, I am sure that, humans being human, gross abuses of power by corporations based on certain datapoints being available exist. I am pretty sure the LGBT community has a slew of great examples there, as well as other outsider communities.
So there wasn't widespread persecution of Jews and horrible crimes against them as a people before there was a government database? As horrible as the events were, and they were truly despicable, the logic is flawed. The conclusion is eradicate government census work and we'll eradicate racial persecution.
I am surprised that this subject is so hard to grasp. The core of this issue is not about privacy. The core issue is about giving a small group too much power.
Giving one organization too much power in a society is bad for long term health of that society. If you want your children to grow up in a healthy society it's on your shoulders to fight laws that give organizations too much power.
By giving the government unlimited access to our privacy it gives the government great amounts of power.
Historically when an organization (such as a governments, FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), Churches, etc) have been given large amounts of power it has quickly lead to a spiral of corruption and destruction of morality and societal values.
If some one tells you:
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Tell them:
"I want you to sign over all of your assets to
a government official of my choice. If you
trust the government, you've got nothing to fear."
The "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." statement is analogous to a lover, locking a bomb to your neck and telling you "If you don't plan on hurting me, then you have nothing to fear". The desire for this kind of power over some one is clinically insane. The desire to have this kind of power over our citizens by politicians is just as clinically insane. It will destroy our society.
I think the simplest argument against people who propose "nothing to hide" is to say, "I have nothing to hide, I just don't trust those morons to keep my data safe and secure."
I used to work in the education sector, and we had access to "anonymised" data. I was able to determine my own National Insurance number using only my address as I'd done an HND a few years before. Basically, anonymising meant removing the first and last name fields only! This was working for a private sector firm that was given the data by the government. I was also on only £10k/year and so presumably a vulnerable target for corruption. And this wasn't even one of the more "secure" datasets we had access to.
How many others are there like me out there with access to your data?
I don't like to pick apart articles on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but I have to take issue with this bit:
>In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television.
"The government"? Very tricksy linguistic sleight of hand makes us sound like an police-state-controlled surveillance society with no privacy and a tyrannical government.
What rot. By far the vast majority of CCTV in the country is owned and operated by private companies on their own private property. This is a huge difference.
>In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Come on now. That's almost cartoonish levels of sloppy writing. No such slogan has ever been used by either our government, or, as far as I know, any organisation concerned with security.
It's not an either-or. The UK has many private surveillance cameras. The UK also has many governmental entities at all levels that have undertaken specific programs to install large numbers of publicly-owned surveillance cameras. If I type "UK to install" in Google, the four autocomplete suggestions provided are all about surveillance cameras. To a first approximation, the UK isn't known for installing roads, or daycares, or traffic lights, or dictators, or shelters for the homeless, but only for surveillance cameras. Congratulations.
The UK just passed a law appointing a Surveillance Camera Commissioner to oversee all the uses of such cameras nationwide. I am not aware that any other countries have found such an appointment necessary.
The research involved police community support officers
counting every camera in Cheshire and extrapolating the
results nationwide to provide a reliable estimate of the
level of CCTV surveillance in the UK.
Officers counted 12,333 cameras in the area, according to
a study published in CCTV Image magazine, the majority of
which were inside premises, rather than facing public
street.
The research also found that most CCTV cameras in the UK
are likely to be privately owned, with only 504 of
Cheshire’s cameras run by public bodies.
In a county of about a million people, only 500+ of the 12,000+ cameras were owned by a government body.
Of course, one would think that it wouldn't be very difficult for the authorities to obtain footage from privately-owned cameras.
Last time I was in London I did see a bunch of signs trying to convince me the eyes in the sky where such great things that enhanced my safety and should make me feel comfortable...there definitely is propaganda out there supporting them...
Personally, I don't really think of CCTV cameras as a privacy issue at all. If you're in a city street you should expect that nothing you do is actually private. Its always been perfectly legal for a cop to stand in the street and notice who enters or leaves a particular building, and in a small town they'd be able to figure out just as much about you from that as a CCTV system with face recognition could in a big city.
The important this is that people be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects", not whether the police can see you walking down the road.
Personally, my fears are not about any current laws, but laws that might be created. I'd much rather for our society to respect privacy in these matters, especially if we have the potential to create laws I'd disagree with.
Also, if people have nothing to hide, let me access their computers for an evening, and also let me send any "proof" of breaking "stupid laws", like watching a dvd on their computer, or accessing a file with unwarranted DMCA takedown notice out for it. There's a lot of potential for innocent people going to jail in a video taped society.
Would they go to jail? Police ignore trivial laws like those against jaywalking all the time. I remember as a kid riding back from a Boy Scout event and with a cop driving and him describing which laws every vehicle we passed were breaking. Not that he'd ever pull them over for those normally - unless he had a hunch that they were carrying drugs or something.
If crimes as minor as decrypting a DVD were actually prosecuted then it wouldn't be a lot of people going to jail. It would be everybody. Including all the cops and judges. Which is never going to happen.
The real danger here is selective enforcement of laws, and the selective enforcement of laws. Well, we have the later already (see "Professional Courtesy") but the former gets much more dangerous to the extent that police officers can control which videos do or do not end up at a courtroom. If a lawyer can show that the police are regularly ignoring an offense in other contexts that can be a defense in the US, but in practice the US justice system does a very bad job of getting exculpatory police collected video evidence into the hands of defense lawyers.
Exactly. Building on jgrahamc's comment - it's the future laws enacted that have cause for concern. At which point will the legal suddenly become illegal and precedence is set?
It's really very simple. I'm not doing anything "wrong," but I cannot guarantee that my definition of "wrong" is the same as the government's.
Recently I've come across an argument that I think helps reveal the problems to those who are not prone to see them: if you have nothing to hide, would you give a copy of your house key to the police to check on your house whenever they want?
Suddenly everything becomes obvious: the cost of inconvenience (what if I'm asleep?), the cost of potential corruption or incompetence (what if they lose the key?), the cost of potential misinterpretation, etc...
Exactly. Translate "doing wrong" to "commiting a crime" and then you end up with a list of hundreds or thousends of criminal laws that you just can't know, each of which is subject to interpretation by individuals with different motivations and attitude towards you, based on potentially incomplete or misleading data etc. etc.
I've always thought the simplest retort to this argument came from Bruce Schneier:
Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
Once i spent a week researching Lotteries on google. Days after, i was getting an almost constant stream of ads for the National Lottery. If anyone were to have used my computer during that time, they might have been puzzled by this and though "Whoah! Is this guy a gambling addict?".
Just imagine if i was researching something slightly more taboo. Someone could easily jump to the wrong conclusions.
I might have nothing to hide, but it certainly isn't right that my information is being used to generate a potentially scandalous false picture of what i might be looking for.
That's why information privacy is so important: those ad networks shouldn't be required to expose your browsing history to anyone (especially the government).
"If your private thoughts were broadcast on a television screen above your head for everyone to see, its fair to say we'd all be more careful what we thought about. We would be forced to practice thought control to give others a good impression. Mental self-discipline is great, but this imaginary scenario illustrates a critical point: the absence of privacy has the ability to influence.
Moreover, the one who usurps privacy is the one who wields that influence. And such control at the cost of privacy is the opposite of freedom. Democracy and freedom are upheld by the individual's right to form thought and opinion and to communicate within the haven of privacy."
If yours were, perhaps. But if everyone's thoughts were constantly being broadcast, we'd learn to accept that sometimes people think strange thoughts, and that it's silly to care so much about it.
Central and Eastern European Jews first had their privacy violated before their jobs taken, moved to ghettos then to concentration camps. Imagine having a German last name but a Jewish grandmother, privacy matters. Or imagine if Germany did not have a handgun registry-- then its harder to confiscate guns from Jews, which makes its much more dangerous to herd them into camps.
Privacy loss ends in dead bodies-- but only after its too late to regain.
None of his retorts really do much for me. I'm fine with people seeing me naked, seeing my credit bills, querying about relationships, etc.. I do have curtains, but it is just so the neighbors don't get pissed their kids see me walking around naked when it's hot.
There is one thing that convinces me, though. I see lots of companies with data just completely misinterpreting it and screwing people over all the time. For instance, I can open a bunch of tabs in Google Groups from Google Reader with the intent to read them later, and get banned by Google Groups because Google decided in their all knowing wisdom that anyone opening tabs that quick must by a bot who has to be banned. Similarly you see AdSense and PayPal accounts banned all the time when the person is actually innocent.
These draconian policies may be good for the company (since it makes sure the actual fraudsters are banned too) and bad for the innocents caught in the way, but as an innocent who can be caught in the way, it makes sense to give them as little data to make up imagined offenses with as possible. Having Google ban innocents all the time is one thing, but we can't really let the government get away with that. That's what the whole innocent until proven guilty business is about and the show me the corpse/evidence and trial by jury things came about because of.
The problem I have with the "nothing to hide" argument is that it is aimed at secrecy and hence invalid. The issue is never about secrecy, it's about privacy, and that's a huge huge difference.
"I dont need privacy because I have nothing to hide" doesn't make much sense.
I have long looked for a more crystal clear way of formulating the importance of privacy and why it's different from having something to hide.
That was a torturous, long winded, poorly written article. The author identified early that the retort "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" was a powerful one. He then reinforced the power of that retort by struggling to rebuke it in this article.
Forgive me for kicking the hornet's nest, but is all this outrage about privacy or about the abuse of government power?
The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.
Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?
The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
What I find most interesting is that few people question why privacy is so important? Children have no sense of it - they have to be socialized to begin to value it. Many smaller societies have no sense of it. Yet a small child and someone from these societies understands immediately if you restrict their ability to move (and thus "freedom") I'm not sure privacy isn't just an extension of shamed based cultural values vs a universal human right like freedom of movement and thought.
I think such naturalistic arguments don't hold up. Children have no sense of many things - they don't see dangers in stepping onto a street without looking, and they don't see dangers in giving up their privacy. If they don't value it, should we not protect their privacy?
Children and some small societies often don't have a strong sense of property rights either - yet would you argue from that that a more complex society still doesn't require property rights?
A somewhat related video that often gets posted, but is worth posting again: Why you should never talk to the police (even if you have nothing to hide!):
It includes some stories that illustrate why information about you, even when you have done nothing wrong, can be used against you by authorities, even purely by mistake not accounting to any corruption/bias/pressure-to-catch/punish-somebody, etc.
Why are there trade secrets? Why is there classified information? Why is there encryption? Why are there door locks and window blinds and fences? What was the big deal about Wikileaks if you have nothing to hide?
If the US government or some MegaCorp wants to dump all of their correspondence and data, decrypted, onto the internet for my perusal, and unlock all the doors, safes, fences and windows on their buildings, then I might consider opening up my personal life to them as well.
[+] [-] ctdonath|13 years ago|reply
1. The "if you have nothing to hide..." line is predicated on the viewer having final say about whether something is right/wrong, thus subordinating the subject to the viewer. This is repulsive to the notion of liberty as protected by the American "4th Amendment" right of freedom from governmental inspection without an adjudicated warrant. To wit: it's not that I have something to hide, it's that someone else is going to be obnoxious if they see it.
On a related but semantically distinct note...
2. Those pushing "if you have nothing to hide..." have suspect & ulterior motives. Their existence (income, job, power, prestige) depend on finding something "wrong". They are, by job description, hostile to me. If they derived nothing from inspecting others, they would not care whether anything was hidden or not. Remember: they seek the power to punish, not just what they find wrong, but what they cannot inspect. Your exposure nets you little, but gains them so much they want to reprimand you for any concealment.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|13 years ago|reply
"Nothing to hide" is thematically similar to the groan-inducing "Do you want the terrorists to win?" arguments against civil liberties, in favor of increased security measures, proferred and popularly supported in the mid-2000s. (Sadly, many of the legacies and artifacts of that position still persist).
The answer to any of these half-baked arguments should always begin with something along the lines of "Because we're better than that." Because we have a constitution that assumes we're good people, and that protects our civil liberties from invasion. Because these things are so fundamental to our nation's purpose that giving them up is much worse than being attacked. Giving them up threatens the very purpose of the country's founding.
Even to entertain these arguments, i.e., by trying to cite examples of areas of privacy or liberty that are negotiable, areas that aren't, and so forth, is to stoop low. It is to lose before the argument has actually begun. It is to accept the faulty premise that privacy is about hiding something -- that it is an active attempt to conceal information from the world. No, privacy isn't the action being taken. Invasion of privacy is the action. Privacy is simply a state of being, and one to which we have an inalienable right.
Privacy isn't something we opt into; it is something we don't even really consider until we are made, or compelled, or asked to opt out. "Nothing to hide" begs the question. It assumes, as a foregone premise, that privacy is an opt-in decision that we consciously undertake in defense of something (and that something is implied to be onerous or illegal). This is just fallacious logic, plain and simple.
It's unfortunate that a right to privacy wasn't inumerated directly in the constitution, but was instead defined indirectly. This is one of those areas where the founders really couldn't have known how far technology would go, and how important something like privacy -- which may have been taken for granted back then -- would become 200+ years later.
[+] [-] Goladus|13 years ago|reply
The problem is both senior's prejudices, AND the fact that he's missing context. Junior might be watching an instructional video. It might be a break after 10 hours straight work. He might be creating videos for the company and uploading them.
In other words, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean someone who looks is going to see the whole true picture.
[+] [-] antninja|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roc|13 years ago|reply
And while people in the US like to take for granted that democracy inevitably marches towards freedom, that simply isn't always so.
There's no guarantee that what was once illegal or suitable grounds for harassment by the community and authorities won't become so again.
"Harmless" records of yourself enjoying alcohol, common recreational drugs, listening to certain brands of music, interacting with currently-legitimate political parties or activist groups -- all could one day be held against you and be found as grounds to have authorities and/or the wider community harass, arrest or otherwise sanction you.
[+] [-] teyc|13 years ago|reply
2. Privacy also reduces the chance I will be discriminated against. If you've lived in a country where the law decides whether you are allowed to purchase land based on your religious beliefs, then you'd appreciate that the less people know about you, the less they can prejudge you.
3. Private conversations allow ideas to be discussed and discarded if they turn out to be wrong or worse still turn out to have ethical issues attached. If every thought are treated as a matter of public discourse that can be held against you in the future, then people will be keeping their mouth shut.
4. One only have to look at how "suspected symphatizers" were killed when South Vietnam fell, to understand that privacy allows people to keep their heads low, and should the environment turn nasty, to stay out of trouble.
[+] [-] Alex3917|13 years ago|reply
Actually those points come up in pretty much every book about privacy. Your first point is heavily discussed in Jeffrey Rosen's book The Unwanted Gaze, and your second point is sort of the point of Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear. See also any of Daniel Solove's books.
[+] [-] mduerksen|13 years ago|reply
This is the most fundamental reason I have seen yet, reflected (often unconsciously) in our daily lives: We have curtains, we talk in private, we have secrets we only tell to those we trust, have company confidentials, discretion, spokesmen, and don't negotiate our salaries in public.
Why? Because we instinctively try to minimize those who might take advantage over us.
Knowledge can be exploited in so many ways that it is very hard to tell if a certain piece of information is harmless or not. If you're at the mercy of someone else, depending on him not to exploit his knowledge over you, you lose freedom.
Most people at least feel this and therefore - in their social interactions - act accordingly. Interestingly, as soon at no human face is involved, my observation is that these instincts break down. I believe that's the core issue today, where most information isn't collected by some creepy stalker, but by web services, governments and card readers. They seem so detached from a real (potentially threatening) person, that our deeply engrained secrecy patterns fail us.
[+] [-] juhanima|13 years ago|reply
Private information is valuable social currency which we use to measure and define the distance between ourselves and others. There are things that are only told to the significant other for instance. By knowing them she/he not only has more power on me but also rightly feels closer to me than anyone else.
When someone finds out such information about me - harmless or not - without my consent he/she positions him/herself too close to me and I feel justly violated. The same way someone may try to diminsh the distance by disclosing facts that are not told to a stranger, expecting me to reciprocate. But at least then I have the option to decline.
I think this is the core issue: wanting privacy is basically wanting to retain control of how close I let other people come, and controlling the amount of facts they know about me is the tool to define that distance. Stealing this valuable social currency does not differ that much from stealing any other type of currency.
[+] [-] re_todd|13 years ago|reply
I couldn't agree more. When I graduated from high school, coming from a small town, I wanted to get a college degree. Unfortunately, I had a low self-esteem and many friends and relatives that would belittle me or my goal. I don't know if they were jealous or I was such an underachiever in high school that it was hard for them to believe I could reach my goal. This really undermined my confidence and my ability to study, leading me to drop out more than once. Finally, I stopped hanging around that town, did not tell anyone about my plans except a few people, and cut off the relationships that put me down the most. Then I went back to college and it was a breeze. I'm not totally cynical, but I believe there are a lot of people out there that will use personal information to hurt you, and it's best to minimize what you tell others until you know who you can trust.
[+] [-] jgrahamc|13 years ago|reply
That's the only example I need to convince me that the government does not need to know everything about who am I and what I do and what I think.
[+] [-] bstpierre|13 years ago|reply
* In the 1930s being Japanese in the USA was perfectly legal. After 1942 it was not.
* Prior to 1947, Americans had freedom of association. Starting in 1947, numerous people were denied employment, and some were jailed ("Hollywood Ten") because of their association. This was a campaign of both government and corporate intimidation.
* Over the past decade or so, numerous people have been denied a certain amount of freedom of movement without any sort of due process because their names generated a match on the TSC's No Fly List.
Those are three very easy examples taken just from the USA. You could generate a much longer list with a bit more effort and expanding to other countries.
[+] [-] afterburner|13 years ago|reply
So turning over everything to this large group, with all its power is... risky to say the least.
[+] [-] eigenvector|13 years ago|reply
The more information the government has, the more it enables future oppressive action.
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bornhuetter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
I would also extend my distrust to corporations. While I don't have a ready-to-mind example, I am sure that, humans being human, gross abuses of power by corporations based on certain datapoints being available exist. I am pretty sure the LGBT community has a slew of great examples there, as well as other outsider communities.
[+] [-] Elte|13 years ago|reply
Having nothing to hide now doesn't mean you'll never have something to hide in retrospect.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jusben1369|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csmeder|13 years ago|reply
Giving one organization too much power in a society is bad for long term health of that society. If you want your children to grow up in a healthy society it's on your shoulders to fight laws that give organizations too much power.
By giving the government unlimited access to our privacy it gives the government great amounts of power.
Historically when an organization (such as a governments, FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), Churches, etc) have been given large amounts of power it has quickly lead to a spiral of corruption and destruction of morality and societal values.
If some one tells you:
Tell them: The "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." statement is analogous to a lover, locking a bomb to your neck and telling you "If you don't plan on hurting me, then you have nothing to fear". The desire for this kind of power over some one is clinically insane. The desire to have this kind of power over our citizens by politicians is just as clinically insane. It will destroy our society.[+] [-] waffle_ss|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philbarr|13 years ago|reply
I used to work in the education sector, and we had access to "anonymised" data. I was able to determine my own National Insurance number using only my address as I'd done an HND a few years before. Basically, anonymising meant removing the first and last name fields only! This was working for a private sector firm that was given the data by the government. I was also on only £10k/year and so presumably a vulnerable target for corruption. And this wasn't even one of the more "secure" datasets we had access to.
How many others are there like me out there with access to your data?
[+] [-] jgroome|13 years ago|reply
>In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television.
"The government"? Very tricksy linguistic sleight of hand makes us sound like an police-state-controlled surveillance society with no privacy and a tyrannical government.
What rot. By far the vast majority of CCTV in the country is owned and operated by private companies on their own private property. This is a huge difference.
>In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Come on now. That's almost cartoonish levels of sloppy writing. No such slogan has ever been used by either our government, or, as far as I know, any organisation concerned with security.
[+] [-] jellicle|13 years ago|reply
The UK just passed a law appointing a Surveillance Camera Commissioner to oversee all the uses of such cameras nationwide. I am not aware that any other countries have found such an appointment necessary.
[+] [-] briandon|13 years ago|reply
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362493/One-CCTV-cam...
In a county of about a million people, only 500+ of the 12,000+ cameras were owned by a government body.Of course, one would think that it wouldn't be very difficult for the authorities to obtain footage from privately-owned cameras.
[+] [-] lnanek2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|13 years ago|reply
The important this is that people be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects", not whether the police can see you walking down the road.
[+] [-] tokenizer|13 years ago|reply
Also, if people have nothing to hide, let me access their computers for an evening, and also let me send any "proof" of breaking "stupid laws", like watching a dvd on their computer, or accessing a file with unwarranted DMCA takedown notice out for it. There's a lot of potential for innocent people going to jail in a video taped society.
[+] [-] Symmetry|13 years ago|reply
If crimes as minor as decrypting a DVD were actually prosecuted then it wouldn't be a lot of people going to jail. It would be everybody. Including all the cops and judges. Which is never going to happen.
The real danger here is selective enforcement of laws, and the selective enforcement of laws. Well, we have the later already (see "Professional Courtesy") but the former gets much more dangerous to the extent that police officers can control which videos do or do not end up at a courtroom. If a lawyer can show that the police are regularly ignoring an offense in other contexts that can be a defense in the US, but in practice the US justice system does a very bad job of getting exculpatory police collected video evidence into the hands of defense lawyers.
[+] [-] TomaszZielinski|13 years ago|reply
So you're the only person who knows all 3000-10000 (depending on the source) federal crimes out there (assuming you're in the USA).
[+] [-] nathansoohoo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|13 years ago|reply
Recently I've come across an argument that I think helps reveal the problems to those who are not prone to see them: if you have nothing to hide, would you give a copy of your house key to the police to check on your house whenever they want?
Suddenly everything becomes obvious: the cost of inconvenience (what if I'm asleep?), the cost of potential corruption or incompetence (what if they lose the key?), the cost of potential misinterpretation, etc...
[+] [-] TomaszZielinski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|13 years ago|reply
Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html
[+] [-] jamesu|13 years ago|reply
Just imagine if i was researching something slightly more taboo. Someone could easily jump to the wrong conclusions.
I might have nothing to hide, but it certainly isn't right that my information is being used to generate a potentially scandalous false picture of what i might be looking for.
[+] [-] firefoxman1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drderidder|13 years ago|reply
"If your private thoughts were broadcast on a television screen above your head for everyone to see, its fair to say we'd all be more careful what we thought about. We would be forced to practice thought control to give others a good impression. Mental self-discipline is great, but this imaginary scenario illustrates a critical point: the absence of privacy has the ability to influence.
Moreover, the one who usurps privacy is the one who wields that influence. And such control at the cost of privacy is the opposite of freedom. Democracy and freedom are upheld by the individual's right to form thought and opinion and to communicate within the haven of privacy."
[+] [-] iy56|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshcrews|13 years ago|reply
Ukrainian peasants were deported and killed for having more property that their neighbor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization 14.5 million dead
Central and Eastern European Jews first had their privacy violated before their jobs taken, moved to ghettos then to concentration camps. Imagine having a German last name but a Jewish grandmother, privacy matters. Or imagine if Germany did not have a handgun registry-- then its harder to confiscate guns from Jews, which makes its much more dangerous to herd them into camps.
Privacy loss ends in dead bodies-- but only after its too late to regain.
[+] [-] lnanek2|13 years ago|reply
There is one thing that convinces me, though. I see lots of companies with data just completely misinterpreting it and screwing people over all the time. For instance, I can open a bunch of tabs in Google Groups from Google Reader with the intent to read them later, and get banned by Google Groups because Google decided in their all knowing wisdom that anyone opening tabs that quick must by a bot who has to be banned. Similarly you see AdSense and PayPal accounts banned all the time when the person is actually innocent.
These draconian policies may be good for the company (since it makes sure the actual fraudsters are banned too) and bad for the innocents caught in the way, but as an innocent who can be caught in the way, it makes sense to give them as little data to make up imagined offenses with as possible. Having Google ban innocents all the time is one thing, but we can't really let the government get away with that. That's what the whole innocent until proven guilty business is about and the show me the corpse/evidence and trial by jury things came about because of.
[+] [-] sharagoz|13 years ago|reply
I have long looked for a more crystal clear way of formulating the importance of privacy and why it's different from having something to hide.
[+] [-] re_todd|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jusben1369|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webwanderings|13 years ago|reply
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Nothing-to-Hide/index...
[+] [-] ameasure|13 years ago|reply
The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.
Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?
The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
[+] [-] jusben1369|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yungchin|13 years ago|reply
I think such naturalistic arguments don't hold up. Children have no sense of many things - they don't see dangers in stepping onto a street without looking, and they don't see dangers in giving up their privacy. If they don't value it, should we not protect their privacy?
Children and some small societies often don't have a strong sense of property rights either - yet would you argue from that that a more complex society still doesn't require property rights?
[+] [-] luriel|13 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
It includes some stories that illustrate why information about you, even when you have done nothing wrong, can be used against you by authorities, even purely by mistake not accounting to any corruption/bias/pressure-to-catch/punish-somebody, etc.
[+] [-] drcube|13 years ago|reply
If the US government or some MegaCorp wants to dump all of their correspondence and data, decrypted, onto the internet for my perusal, and unlock all the doors, safes, fences and windows on their buildings, then I might consider opening up my personal life to them as well.