Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide' (2011)

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if-You-Have-Nothing-to-Hide/127461/

by davidbarker • 12 years ago

130 73 12 years ago

Kenji2• 12 years ago

It is surprising to me that there's even a debate about whether having privacy is needed in a society that is based on taboos and lies.

inanutshellus2• 12 years ago

... refering to every human-managed society ever, I assume? Perk up, my friend. The world's not so dreary as all that.

Kenji2• 12 years ago

"... refering to every human-managed society ever, I assume?"

Of course! Controlling information is an integral part of all kinds of relationships. I didn't want to sound overly dramatic, I just thought I'd like to call things by their name.

johnvschmitt• 12 years ago

It's a well thought out & written article.

But, we still need a much shorter retort to use in conversation, than trying to discuss all of the points in that article.

Maybe:

"Well, if you think privacy is only for criminals, then you wouldn't mind if me and my friends, and your boss, all ride home with you tonight, & spend the night watching you sleep & all the stuff before that, right? Can your bathroom fit us all? If not, please pay some taxes to support that surveillance need. We'll be there every night from now on. See? Privacy is about "not being watched", not about "hiding crimes".

HarryHirsch• 12 years ago

"Could I have the password to your email?"

nagrom• 12 years ago

You don't do anything strange in the bathroom right? So I'd like to have a camera fitted facing the pan. It's not like you do anything the rest of us don't, and there has been a problem of people illegally flushing refuse down the sewer. This monitoring camera can ensure that you're an upright member of society and everything is OK.

mkal_tsr7• 12 years ago

I linked my friends to his paper "I’ve Got Nothing To Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" [1] when I was closing down my Facebook and other social network sites; it does a great job of explaining multiple aspects of privacy as well as show the absurdity of "Well if you have nothing to hide"

[1] http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf

3rd32• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899784

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957864

SilasX8• 12 years ago

I've noticed something strange: no one who recommends that article wants to put the core argument in their own words.

Edit: never mind, I missed the second link, whose first comment has a good one (assuming it's faithful to the paper):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4958033

mkal_tsr7• 12 years ago

Well, I've tried to make the argument several times, but I usually only hit several aspects of privacy. One of the reasons why I do recommend that paper is it (in my mind) sufficiently breaks down and refutes the 'nothing to hide' argument from multiple angles and exposes the fallacy for what it is, rather than resorting to emotional appeal like, "show me your email"

I don't think it's strange at all, if you find something that you completely agree with and is articulated better than you could phrase it yourself, why go through the work of making the same argument with the same reasoning but in a poorer form?

tanglisha• 12 years ago

Depending on the person I'm talking to, I have two approaches.

1. Do you trust the government that will be in place 20 years from now? Most of those people are now teenagers. 2. We don't know what law changes may happen in the future. The data gathered can make you look like someone who will break one of those laws. Ex post facto (protection for someone who broke a law before it was in effect) has been overturned by the Supreme Court in specific cases in the past.

stretchwithme• 12 years ago

You may not have any to hide...from rational people. But guess what? Not everybody is sane and respectful and waits until all the facts are in. Or are capable of understanding all the facts.

It can be very time consuming trying to explain yourself to random people whose opinions you really shouldn't care about. Because they don't keep those private.

inanutshellus2• 12 years ago

"Privacy is not to protect you from the government of today, it's to protect you from the government of tomorrow."

tomp• 12 years ago

Rational people is a very vague word; in particular, I assume most people consider themselves rational, but not necessarily others. Personally, I consider people who were protesting Brendan Eich's position as CEO of Mozilla based on some past, popular (i.e. consistent with majority opinion) non-violent non-crime, but are not protesting Condoleza Rice's position on Dropbox's board or Israel's attacks on Gaza, to be highly irrational. But there seems to be a lot of them (especially in the media), and they have proven to have huge destructive power, so it makes sense to hide stuff from them.

3rd32• 12 years ago

Earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105485

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846076

bostik• 12 years ago

The first of your links has this absolutely wonderful bit on the very first comment: 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. [direct link to full comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4105697]

That pretty much crystallises the core of the problem. It's never about what is right, wrong or proper - only what is approved to be more or less appropriate at the time. (A malleable thing in itself.)

Go give your upvotes to the original poster. Read the full comment while at it, too.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

The biggest problem with the 'OK, let me see your credit card statements' retort is that, well, of course they don't want you to see stuff. It's all too easy to say that the government is impartial, composed of perfect human beings that follow the rules, and that the rules are reinforced by lots of checks and balances. Most people don't realize that their neighbors, friends, ex-spouses, etc. could be the ones watching them.

But even if the argument is not humans watching you, but computers, what happens when you say "terraces" on the phone and the computer algorithm transcribes it as "terrorists"? Or if you look up "bomb making", out of curiosity, using Google, and get permanently flagged as a potential suspect in every bombing from now on? You know you are not a criminal, but these systems make it so ridiculously easy to provide evidence that any one person committed any one crime.

jonnathanson2• 12 years ago

This is a very good and worthwhile encapsulation of the major problems with the "nothing to hide" argument, but also with the externalities and emergent privacy-invasions that can occur with the aggregation of seemingly innocuous data. (See: the author's example about inferences that can be made from one's purchase histories.)

The other thing I'd add to this discussion is the question of what you're sharing with whom. The who of it all matters a great deal. Amazon collects a lot of data about my purchase history, for instance, and while the ramifications make me somewhat uncomfortable, I accept them. It's part of the shopping experience, and it's part of Amazon's business model. But take that purchase history out of context, and put it in the hands of someone looking for a very different set of inferences about me. A healthcare provider, for example, who can make startlingly precise inferences about my lifestyle and my likely state of health from my Amazon purchases. This scenario seems farfetched today. And I trust Amazon to be a reasonable steward of my information, and to maintain some sanctity over the context in which it's aggregated and analyzed. But I'm scattering plenty more breadcrumbs around the internet in my digital travels. I can only imagine the novel and ingenious ways they'll be used in the future -- for me, hopefully, but just as easily against me. It all depends on who's looking at my data, and for what purposes. Those people, and those purposes, might be very far removed from the people and purposes I'd originally envisioned when I'd shared my data. In most cases I can't really control that. That's what scares me.

Data context matters a great deal. So does the presumed aggregator of the data, and so do the presumed consumer(s) of that aggregation.

I think it's important to make this point to the general public, because the typical bogeymen (the NSA, Google, Facebook, etc.) don't really mean much to most people. When you conjure up the NSA, your average layperson will shrug and say "I have nothing to hide from them." Just mentioning the NSA brings up a fantastical frame of reference: a frame involving terrorists, leaks, Jack Bauer, and Edward Snowden. Most people, in that frame of reference, find it so far removed from their daily lives as to be almost comical. This breeds apathy. That apathy gets you the shrug and the dismissal. But conjure up a different frame of reference -- being denied health coverage because of purchase histories, or being turned down for a job because of image searches -- and people seem to get the idea.

We need to do a better job educating people about a) closer-to-home implications of privacy erosion, and b) examples of data, seemingly mundane, that can be aggregated to powerful effect. Yes, the big stuff matters. We should be making a big fuss about the NSA. But that's not the rhetorical starting point that's going to get Joe Sixpack to care. In some cases, it might even be counterproductive.

SilasX8• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, there is no legal difference between sharing with Amazon and sharing with the government, according to a regular commenter. This is because you cannot (apparently) have an expectation of privacy in things you share with a third party, unless it falls under specific exceptions.

jonnathanson2• 12 years ago

To the extent that's true (IANAL), it's the kind of thing we need to be making the first issue of. That's all I'm saying. Bringing up "the government" takes a lot of people out of the argument from the outset. It turns them off. It prompts them, subconsciously, into the "I have nothing to hide" mindset. So instead, we should talk to them about what it means to share something with any third party, and what other third parties those guys can share your data with -- and what that could mean for you, in very practical terms, with proximate, real-world scenarios.

rayiner3• 12 years ago

I agree, and I think techies shoot themselves in the foot trying to thread the needle by demonizing government data collection while justifying data collection by tech companies. For the vast majority of people, the idea of companies sharing private information amongst each other is a lot more scary and concrete than invocations of 1984, etc. If you want people to be scared of government data collection, what will do it is the prospect of that date being shared with employers, credit card companies, etc.

dalecooper3• 12 years ago

A common logical fallacy is the false dichotomy of government vs. corporation. In modernity, there is no meaningful difference between the two. Power is a zero-sum game. Both groups must increase its own power by decreasing the power of the individual it encounters. Both consume power from people in the form of money, labor, information, abstract freedom, and civil liberties. Ultimately both groups can become most successful by being hostile to humanity (as opposed to "promoting human progress").

Welcome to the Kali Yuga! The age in which down is up.

Xophmeister• 12 years ago

I'm not the least bit an apologist for the UK government, but I don't believe it's true that they have installed thousands of security cameras watching our every move. Similarly, I have never seen an "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!" banner anywhere here; but again, I can't claim that they don't exist. My anecdotal understanding is that almost all security cameras in the UK are privately owned and generally passively monitored (e.g., if there's a break in and the recording hasn't been overwritten, then that specific tape may be analysed).

Otherwise, of course, I stand by the sentiment that one has a right to privacy and the 'nothing to hide' argument is spurious.

seanflyon5• 12 years ago

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveilla...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television

It is a fact that the UK government has installed thousands of security cameras.

fragsworth• 12 years ago

The surveillance state already has a tangible impact on political speech and the spread of ideas. Consider heated political banter between two individuals (who know each other fairly well) in private:

Person 1: "I really hate that Politician X lied about Y"

Person 2: "Yeah, he really deserves to die."

Person 2, though he's probably not thinking of killing Politician X, now has to think twice about saying this if it's over any wires.

But the intent of the message is to express extreme hatred for political hypocrisy, not to actually kill anyone.

The idea of destroying the government used to be a thing people could discuss in private, and while it rarely panned out to anything, it helped spread political ideas.

Now if people say these things in private, they are at serious risk of being targeted by the NSA or other agencies that have access to their communications.

hyperion2010• 12 years ago

My go to response for this now is to appeal to good old Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me six lines written in the hand of the most honest man and I will see him hanged." When you give the state total control over information and it interpretation then it doesn't matter whether you have nothing to hide, because the state can simply fabricate it.

pcrh6• 12 years ago

An addendum to that is that that if a sufficiently large and diverse dataset is interrogated, then one can find connections between person A and criminal B, when such connections, while real, are accidental.

chillingeffect• 12 years ago

Exactly. It's not just the collecting of the data that's dangerous, but the absolutely belief in it's veracity.

Consider the recent google case where they reported a guy to authorities for child porn...

Couldn't any ISP simply insert child porn into someone's email and report them? Doesn't that mean ISPs could go after anyone they have a personal grudge against. Everyone will believe the evidence the ISP produces.

Symmetry• 12 years ago

I can imagine a society where you could actually have "nothing to hide," but that's not the society we live in.

kordless• 12 years ago

One thing cryptocurrencies bring us is is computed trust. A good blockchain will deliver an accurate representation of the current state of trust between entities. With privacy, you enjoy the lack of that state of trust, or what I call 'inverse trust'.

When you enjoy privacy, you trust I don't know anything about you.

It feels like privacy advocates gloss over the actual cost of implementing good privacy. Given it is related to trust, and computed trust costs something, one would assume that privacy is something you should be willing to pay for. The correlation is that if someone wants to remove your ability to remain private, they should have to pay an equal or greater value to do so.

goodside2• 12 years ago

This article is a poor argument against "nothing to hide".

It starts with eight paragraphs attacking a strawman: "Can I see your credit card bills for the last year?" As though anyone seriously thinks all financial data should be public. Everyone has something to hide from you, obviously, the issue is whether they have anything to hide from the NSA.

After reflecting on the ethereality of privacy, the author argues from fictional evidence, reminding us how evil surveillance was in Kafka and Orwell. The proponents of "nothing to hide" do not live in a dystopia. You don't need to convince them that surveillance is bad in North Korea, you need to convince them that it's bad in a liberal democracy with independent press and functioning courts.

The author explains that governments collect far more than most realize. This is very true, but it does nothing to defeat "nothing to hide", whose proponents should be fine with an NSA that is literally omniscient. Nobody believes government data collection is morally justified because it is ineffective.

He worries the government will gain an incomplete view of suspects, persecuting innocent people who would be exonerated by details they can't see. In the real world, law enforcement doesn't get to decide who is guilty. If their incompetence leads to investigations of innocent people, the result is an embarrassing defeat in court once more evidence comes to light, which they are obviously motivated to avoid. Arguably, one way to prevent prosecution of innocents is to ensure the government has more surveillance, so law enforcement can correctly distinguish aspiring meth manufacturers from writers of Breaking Bad fanfics.

By the time the author gets to his strongest point, that data scooped up by intelligence agencies might leak to the public, he does nothing to support that such an event is likely. How many instances are there where real people have been affected by leaks of data collected by the NSA/FBI/CIA? There may be good reasons to worry about such leaks anyway, like known leaks from private companies and local police departments, but none of these are presented.

Of course, the author objects to demands for the "dead bodies" of privacy erosion: "But if this is the standard to recognize a problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized." Yes, and that's the point: Proponents of "nothing to hide" believe there is no actual harm to anyone who isn't guilty, and the author presents no counterexamples to dispel this belief.

dalecooper3• 12 years ago

Respectfully: Are you implying that the United States is a liberal democracy with an independent press and functioning courts?

Or are you suggesting that the argument of privacy exists only as a function of context? (e.g. One doesn't desire one's future employer to be made aware of one's disease, but one does desire his/her physician to be made aware...)

Cyther606• 12 years ago

you need to convince them that it's bad in a liberal democracy with independent press and functioning courts

Do you not follow the Snowden case?

You honestly think big media conglomerates constitute a perfectly independent press?

I've heard, in a big USA city, radio ads calling for locals to report people torrenting files out of coffee houses. That for ratting out your fellow citizens, for what amounts to nothing more than distributing shared culture, you will receive money in return.

So what if the press is "independent"? What if I just completely disagree with talking points fed to the "independent" press by rich and powerful companies who stand to gain from human suffering.

In addition, can you please explain how courts in western countries are "functioning" properly now that NSA-based parallel construction methods are becoming prevalent? How is that fair? How is the surveillance even legal?

Finally, in the real world, if you had the ability to pick between a speedy, censorship-free GuiFi CJDNS mesh network running anonymously over I2P, and the government sponsored spy-filled funfest alternative, would you say that all GuiFi users must have "something to hide"? Is there NO reason to have anonymity?

Anonymity is unquestionably a benefit for consumers. It is a benefit to protect one's identity. There is _zero_ upside to having all of your data recorded 24/7, indefinitely, by agencies with the power to kill you and to ruin your life. Worse, they can do so for purely political reasons: see Aaron Swartz.

Paul-ish• 12 years ago

He worries the government will gain an incomplete view of suspects, persecuting innocent people who would be exonerated by details they can't see. In the real world, law enforcement doesn't get to decide who is guilty. If their incompetence leads to investigations of innocent people, the result is an embarrassing defeat in court once more evidence comes to light, which they are obviously motivated to avoid. Arguably, one way to prevent prosecution of innocents is to ensure the government has more surveillance, so law enforcement can correctly distinguish aspiring meth manufacturers from writers of Breaking Bad fanfics.

Except that the government can change your life without any trial. The government can put you on a list that requires you to undergo extra screening at the airport. Or you might even get put on the No Fly List. There is no way you can contest being placed on either list. These sorts of lists may just be confined to air travel for now, but after the next crisis, who knows how they add "security" for our own safety?

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

goodside2• 12 years ago

The courts have already ruled in favor of the ACLU on requiring a process to get false positives off the no-fly list: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-no-fly-list-violates-rig...

Also, it's not clear that this list would be any smaller if there were less government surveillance. Presumably, the less the government knows about you the more paranoid they would be about letting you on an airplane, given you share a name with a known terrorist.

And, frankly, if the single most egregious collateral damage to result from a spy apparatus as large as the NSA/CIA/FBI is that some people have trouble getting on airplanes, that's really not that bad.

athenot• 12 years ago

Another argument is asymmetry.

I would not be opposed to having every bit of my life tracked IF I could also track and datamine every little detail about the people in power, the governors, the local police, the algorithms used in processing my information and the names/dates/places of people who ever see my information or a derivation thereof.

It is time to turn that argument back on its proponents:

- Dear local police force, if you have nothing to hide, why do you object that people show your location in real time?

- Dear Senator, if you have nothing to hide, why do you object we see in real time your phone logs/emails/credit card transactions?

- Dear Insurance Company, if you have nothing to hide, why do you object we access you risk model?

- etc.

dllthomas4• 12 years ago

Your focus on asymmetry of information ignores asymmetry of power.

seanflyon5• 12 years ago

Asymmetry of power does not necessitate asymmetry of privacy.

ranran876• 12 years ago

I think it's a bit of a false equivalence - but I do agree that , while in office, public servants should have very little privacy. No one is forcing you into the job. If you want to serve the public, be ready for your and your whole family's finances to be open. Where you get your money and who you associate with are all things that are for your constituents to know

brandonmenc• 12 years ago

It matters because a member of government can be extorted with recordings of their not-necessarily-illegal activities - like cheating on a spouse.

I can't think of a more concise argument than this.

johngalt• 12 years ago

Either we get a handle on the NSA or 10 years from now we find out that the NSA was targeting X political group illegally.

What happens when we find out that the NSA was combing through data more thoroughly for democrats? IMHO this is 10x more of a 'threat to our freedom' than any terrorist.

jensen123• 12 years ago

Many people say things like: "I'm just an average guy. I have nothing to hide. My life is boring. I never do anything unusual."

Ironically, it is perhaps these people who have the most to lose from surveillance?

As most of you already know, the difference between rich and poor has been increasing since the 70s/80s. Most of the nothing-to-hiders are probably ordinary middle class folks. What if the difference between rich and poor continue to increase? Normally, people could protest against this sort of thing, and get taxes on the rich raised to even things out a bit.

The surveillance-police-state that has been created in the name of fighting terrorism and drugs, could be used for other things, too, no? Like against protesters in favor of some income re-distribution.

I wouldn't be surprised if the nothing-to-hiders will wake up one day, realizing that they are living in a very unpleasant society: A society where the elite is living in luxury and the rest in squalor. A society where "those with connections" don't get punished for crimes, but where the rest are punished harshly. A society where those who win the lottery of birth will do well, but where the average guy has no opportunities.

And because of the surveillance-police-state, they will not be able to change it.

stmfreak• 12 years ago

"Nothing to hide" adherents have a temporal problem. They might have nothing to hide their present government's observations and laws, but it takes little effort to find points in history where the same people might have held opinions or taken actions contrary to the laws of the time.

And then there are those of us who live in Countries today with very oppressive laws or tyrants hunting down those who oppose them. Certainly there are those with something to hide somewhere in the world whom even "nothing to hide" adherents might sympathize with from their ivory tower, first-world perspective.

The sword of the Tyrant is forged and sharpened during times of peace. We would all be wise to not give our peaceful governments the tools and weapons of our children's destruction and enslavement.

pdkl95• 12 years ago

Anybody who argues that they have "nothing to hide" is just announcing that they cannot reason beyond their own self-interest.

Sometimes it's not about "you".

Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide' (2011)

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