The thing about privacy is you never know when future politics is going to come into play.
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
I work with prosecutors, and some of them will straight up misrepresent innocent facts to paint them as evidence of malicious intent and pressure parties to plead guilty.
I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.
It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.
When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.
Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
> I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court.
Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.
Bigtech will happily store data on their users indefinitely so they can mine it in the future, should they think of new profit-generating ideas. But they will absolutely delete their employee's emails after N months unless they are on litigation hold (i.e. legally required not to do so). Complete double standard.
I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir.
And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.
> having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court
And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?
> Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.
Yeah. Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a very real example of how things can dramatically change on a whim to an unbelievable level. Or syncing your cycle data to a smart device and later having a retro-scan to detect cycle anomalies to charge women with probable crimes.
We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
What I find most ironic is that those people who are now realizing the same privacy platforms they used to defend with "I have nothing to hide" are the ones complying against their interests.
It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.
It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".
Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.
It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.
Canonical example here are the records (that included religion) kept by the Dutch that enabled the nazis to easily round up all the jews in The Netherlands during WWII
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.
McCarthyism was how this played out in the states. Not as brutal and bloody, but lives were still ruined.
In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.
My government evaluates police work by number of cases. What does the police do if there is not enough crime? For example they look at energy usage of people and try to spot patterns that might indicate something like a weed farm. If the pattern match your home will be searched. This is a supposedly civilized western country that managed to start two dictatorships in just one century and had massive problems with surveillance. You can guess the country now...
Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...
So far, the only jurisdictions in the developed world who seem to be on a trajectory towards increased or at least not decreased privacy of any type are in Europe.
I'm not sure why it's especially governments. I find this propensity for privacy focused people to overlap with more conservative thinking individuals very perplexing. Especially since typically the more prominent feature of conservatism is support towards large corporations - which are the largest entities removing our privacy.
It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.
Were they arrested for "protesting the monarchy" or breaching the peace? Context is important. Silently holding up a banner: fine. Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO. A bit like yelling at women entering an abortion clinic, or yelling loyalist slogans at an IRA funeral. There's a time & place.
Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".
The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others. They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because they are decidedly anti-free-speech. They are now reaping what they have sowed.
The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.
We're not, never were. We're seeing the slow decline in the hard fought rights gained over decades because we were never ever a live and let live country.
There is a risk to using "not private" services. And like all risks, it has to be measured and balanced against what you gain from taking that risk.
For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.
Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.
There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.
I think you can even attack this position immediately. When a person (or politician) say they have nothing to hide, ask them to hand you their unlocked phone. You will promise to not tell anyone about anything that you learn or see. I've found that this triggers people desire for privacy even if they haven't committed any "crimes" or what not.
The future politic of other country to. I love to travel, so I try not critic other country online just because I scared that can be use against me when visiting a country with a authoritarian regime.
My take on this is, even if you trust [insert data holding brand name], do you:
- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?
- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?
- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?
Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.
Right. The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either. Their ethnicity was outed by things like census data that people divulged and the state collected. Nothing to hide after all. It's not a crime to be Jewish.
Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.
> The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either.
Actually it started much earlier than that.
Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
I don't consider myself a paranoid person, but I realized 20 years ago that we were all losing our privacy to online entities. When I first read about "the cloud", I knew that what I put on it was no longer mine. Government regulators don't care at all about our privacy, so what makes anyone really think they have nothing to hide? Honestly though, I can't imagine my life without these entities stealing my data, that's how bad it has become!
You also don't know what future you will be doing. Lots of activists where people with pretty boring lives until someone happened with them that triggered their indignation and revolt. Or maybe some relative of yours, or a friend. It doesn't matter, you don't know future you.
I always try to break privacy concerns down because when everything is lumped together I think people that aren't into privacy get confused.
There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.
Eh, you may not “know” something like this, but considering it’s never happened in my country in my lifetime at any appreciable scale, it’s probably not very likely, and doesn’t realistically factor into my threat model.
If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.
It just happened in the US. A lady and her daughter were arrested for taking a federally approved abortion pill based on information found when they subpoenaed their Facebook messenger chat.
On the other hand, people from every country which has had dictatorships (like many if not most in Latin America) should be wary of this kind of scenarios.
If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.
> If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.
But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
> But I'm more interested in convenience.
This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.
Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.
Posted this two years and five months ago, but its still relevant: My nothing to hide argument;
Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? surely you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from rich mobsters with kidney problems..
we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many someones.
Perfect rebuttal, imo. Everyone has something to hide. It doesn’t mean you’re actively committing crimes… those who say they don’t care the NSA are reading everything they write lack imagination, imo.
I have even more trivial examples: love letters, nude photos, political articles you don't intend to publish, medical records, attempts at poetry, porn collection, business plans, drawings etc
I would turn this argument around on itself and say, yes, of course I have things to hide, but none of those things need to hidden from 1) authorities conducting legitimate searches; 2) mass surveillance programs that are looking for terrorists; 3) advertising trackers; 4) and so on.
You're absolutely right that who and what matter here, but I find the typical who and the typical what to be entirely unobjectionable.
It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments. Of course it's easy to think of hypothetical policies to which I'd object; the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
The only way to get me to agree that a policy is odious is for you to make up some hypothetical policy that doesn't exist and say, "but what if that happened?!!" And I just don't find that very compelling.
In summary, you're absolutely right that, "nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence." The complete sentence is this: I have nothing to hide from any of the people currently looking in any of the places they're looking.
>It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments
Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business!
>the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
You may not care, but I do care, and lots of other people do too. My right to privacy is inherently linked to my dignity as a human being and the neither the government, or anyone else, has the right to violate my human dignity no matter how important they think it is or how inconsequential the details of what I want to keep private are! If you have different ideas about human dignity and privacy, and you want to share all of the intimate details of your life to every government and corporate entity on the planet, more power to you. Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Some of us do have a problem with that, solely for the (completely valid) reason that we value our privacy and what we do in our bathrooms is not the government's business, or facebook's business, or the business of anyone else, no matter how vehemently they claim they need to peer into our bathrooms for "national security" reasons or to target us with ads. The same goes for the rest of our lives.
I suppose my pointing out the obvious, isn't that obvious to people. But it strikes me as a crazy blind spot; Every serial killer, rapist, child abuser, blackmailer and swindler - had a job, in IT, in civil service, many more recently in the police force. We are bombarded with a steady stream of examples. How can people maintain a Disney princess belief in strangers, so long as they are employed?
currently being the key word there. can you guarantee you will feel this way for the life of your data? if suddenly you become concerned with those collecting the data what do you do with the historical profile they’ve built for you?
> 1) authorities conducting legitimate searches; 2) mass surveillance programs that are looking for terrorists;
Right. Who decides they're legitimate? And who the terrorists are?
Would you like the right to check your location history for church attendance, or the left to scan your messages for inappropriate thinking? That could be made legitimate with the right parliament :)
Bruce Schneier put it quite succinctly in his article The Eternal Value of Privacy (from 2006):
Some clever answers: “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not.
It plays into the principle of probable cause (which may or may not be law in your state) and against the idea of widespread surveillance and data retention.
There's the recent story about a man texting pictures of his son's infected <groin area> to his wife and doctor, then Google deletes his account and won't give it back. Oh, and the local law enforcement had a case on him about it. Tell me what evil this man did to deserve what happened.
Privacy would help here but more importantly these big companies need to provide a way to fix errors. Seems once you get caught by one of the filters you get suspended and are offered no path to clarify the situation.
These companies should not police pictures in the first place. The user should have privacy from these corporations as well. This is not a vehicle to fight crime. If it becomes that criminals will quickly find out and switch channels and you are left with false allegations.
Not really. You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to the cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point. This man could have been suspended by the government, and he would have had to clarify the situation to a judge. Granted, the judge would be infinitely more receptive to arguments than Google, but it shouldn't have to come to that.
Everyone who says "I have nothing to hide" is a bold faced liar.
Porn browsing history,bank credentials, intimacy,that one drug fueled party you wish didnt happened,medical records, own kids images, hell, people do not even speak about their salaries.
The only ones worse than these are the people saying "If you do not have anything to hide".
No, thanks. If you want to share your things with the world and governments and private companies, go ahead, but leave me alone.
You would be surprised at how many people are completely and utterly boring. How many have so few assets, vanilla history, no embarrassing health issues, and believe all drugs are for wastrels.
Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy :) :(
"Everybody lies". Even if the majority of people's history and proclivities are considered "vanilla", those individuals themselves don't want that information being made public, would likely feel some sense of shame if the information got out, and want to avoid any situation where they would be judged or teased. Even if that content is considered relatively tame by a tolerant society.
>Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy
Why are you making folks that disagree with you "the enemy?"
Just because some doesn't agree with you about a particular issue doesn't mean they are your enemy.
They just disagree with you on a particular issue. Assuming they live in the same culture, it's likely that they agree with you on more stuff than they disagree.
Actually it’s not that hard for companies to get salary information about new hires. Equifax has a tool called the Work Number that lots of employers subscribe to. Each report lists every company an employee worked for, total salary, and every paycheck dollar value they received. You can request your report for free.
So yeah, now employees looking for a salary boost can’t even lie about their current salary anymore.
I believe you have a right to "freeze" your work number profile so that they cannot share your past employment and salary information, at least if you live in California. They warn you that other jobs may not be able to verify your employment but I have never had an issue since asking for and being granted a hold on selling my information.
On a side note, never let past salaries dictate your salary negotiation. Always stand your ground, and sell your pricetag. Your past low salary or lack of successful negotiation, does not warrant them a discount.
Negotiators always try to talk down your value, even when you're already paid high. You need to own your pricetag.
The thing which always irks me about the "I have nothing to hide" comment is would you behave the same if you were being observed. The conversations we all have in the pub, in the car and even in the privacy of our home - would they be the same knowing there is a camera or audio device listening.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
My standard response to "I have nothing to hide" is "then why are you wearing clothes?". It seems to work relatively well to put things into the exact perspective you describe.
My response is to "I have nothing to hide", is that isn't what you're giving up when you give away your privacy. You should be comfortable with "never needing to hide anything in your past, present, or future". The future is impossible to predict and actions that could be innocuous today may cause a great deal of trouble for you in the future. You give up that right forever when you lose privacy.
I believe there is a much more powerful control mechanism than recording devices. It's in your own brain created by years of socialization and there is no way to hide form it, no thought without it. Some may call it conscience but I think may of its parts are simply surveillance software. It's why most people unconsciously signal it to others when they lie or have done some socially unacceptable things. It can even lower your own self-esteem. That is to say that it has real power.
You may have nothing to hide in the current political climate or under the current political leaders, but what is allowed now might become anathema later, and those records can be searched and retroactively prosecuted.
We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
This is actually my argument for the 2nd amendment too.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
>I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
True but your arguments here largely regard deliberate speech, whereas the post is more about personal data. What OS is running on your phone doesn't really make a difference in whether you get cancelled over something your posted on social media 10 years ago.
But were you in a certain building at the time the opposition party was having a meeting? Did you have dinner with this certain person who was part of an underground resistance (of which you had no idea at the time)? Your phone was turned off for 10 hours, during which this murder happened and someone saw you in the area.
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
I think the discussion around privacy is too often framed in a defensive manner. Instead, I think the conversation should be reframed as a matter of a right to know. In other words, the burden of proof is not on those whose information is being sought, but those who seek that information about others or from others. If you want to know something, you must have a justification for knowing. The presumption is in favor of privacy. Furthermore, consent alone is not enough to justify seeking or sharing some kinds of information. (This should be read in a common sense way. I am not proposing a society of antisocial and hostile loners terrified to have a conversation with anyone.)
Take medical information. Who has a right to know that you have cancer? Depression? A spouse, the parent of a young child are entitled to health information as a general principle because of the nature of those relationships. But is Google, some guy at Google, your grocer, some colleague entitled? No. However, a criminal case may require obtaining such information and so the state may have a legitimate, conditional, and very selective claim to that kind of information in certain circumstances.
Privacy is necessary for human beings to flourish, at least in this life. As a practical matter, knowing something about someone can impede the good of both the person about whom something is known as well as the knower. It can negatively affect human relationships. Knowing the boundaries does require sound prudential judgement, of course, which is why if you're unsure, it can help to ask yourself what the justification for inquiring or disclosing is in a given situation. (Gossips are people who lack this sort of prudence and suffer from intemperate curiosity.)
I totally agree. I [knowingly] divulge personal information only when I choose to, and protest pretty vocally when information I don't feel like divulging is requested or "required". You can imagine the scathing feedback I gave to the _legally-mandated_ federal census I got subjected to last year. It asked stuff like my religious beliefs, gender identity, stuff that honestly the government has zero business even asking me, let alone knowing.
Readit News
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.
It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.
When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.
Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.
I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.
You're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? That's literally one of the arguments they used against her.
And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?
Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.
We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
Has anyone actually got in trouble for that? I turned around those checkpoints all the time because it's just faster to go around.
Change, but not retroactively.
It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.
It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".
Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.
It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.
In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.
Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...
It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.
Seeing the arrests in Edinburgh this past week has been heart wrenching. It's just... I thought we were better than that?
Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".
The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.
For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.
Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.
There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.
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- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?
- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?
- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?
Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.
Edit: tried to make it clearer.
You have nothing to hide... yet.
Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.
Actually it started much earlier than that.
Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
More detail: https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-dangerous-fo...
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There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.
If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.
Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.
In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.
But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
> But I'm more interested in convenience.
This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.
Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.
Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? surely you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from rich mobsters with kidney problems..
we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many someones.
Plenty to hide from basically everyone.
You're absolutely right that who and what matter here, but I find the typical who and the typical what to be entirely unobjectionable.
It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments. Of course it's easy to think of hypothetical policies to which I'd object; the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
The only way to get me to agree that a policy is odious is for you to make up some hypothetical policy that doesn't exist and say, "but what if that happened?!!" And I just don't find that very compelling.
In summary, you're absolutely right that, "nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence." The complete sentence is this: I have nothing to hide from any of the people currently looking in any of the places they're looking.
Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business!
>the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
You may not care, but I do care, and lots of other people do too. My right to privacy is inherently linked to my dignity as a human being and the neither the government, or anyone else, has the right to violate my human dignity no matter how important they think it is or how inconsequential the details of what I want to keep private are! If you have different ideas about human dignity and privacy, and you want to share all of the intimate details of your life to every government and corporate entity on the planet, more power to you. Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Some of us do have a problem with that, solely for the (completely valid) reason that we value our privacy and what we do in our bathrooms is not the government's business, or facebook's business, or the business of anyone else, no matter how vehemently they claim they need to peer into our bathrooms for "national security" reasons or to target us with ads. The same goes for the rest of our lives.
Right. Who decides they're legitimate? And who the terrorists are?
Would you like the right to check your location history for church attendance, or the left to scan your messages for inappropriate thinking? That could be made legitimate with the right parliament :)
Some clever answers: “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not.
— https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/
> “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.”
Because they couldn't know you're not doing anything wrong unless they watch you. Not doing anything wrong does not get rid of their "need" to watch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
He had nothing illegal to hide, but got screwed anyway. Privacy would have been useful in this situation, wouldn't it?
Porn browsing history,bank credentials, intimacy,that one drug fueled party you wish didnt happened,medical records, own kids images, hell, people do not even speak about their salaries.
The only ones worse than these are the people saying "If you do not have anything to hide".
No, thanks. If you want to share your things with the world and governments and private companies, go ahead, but leave me alone.
Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy :) :(
Also, pretty much everyone is guilty of, at the very very least, numerous traffic violations.
Why are you making folks that disagree with you "the enemy?"
Just because some doesn't agree with you about a particular issue doesn't mean they are your enemy.
They just disagree with you on a particular issue. Assuming they live in the same culture, it's likely that they agree with you on more stuff than they disagree.
particularly mental health.
So yeah, now employees looking for a salary boost can’t even lie about their current salary anymore.
https://theworknumber.com/
Maybe in the UK too, but no in the EU,I think Sweden or Norway have total transparency on tax returns etc, though.
Or just say some percentage is a bonus or equity. And especially, ask them for what you want anyway.
I have guessed too low a couple times before, so now I simply go for current rate *1.5 and see if it sticks.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
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Ignoring the role social taboo plays in that interaction isn’t intellectually honest.
We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
Firearms protecting rights is a myth.
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
Take medical information. Who has a right to know that you have cancer? Depression? A spouse, the parent of a young child are entitled to health information as a general principle because of the nature of those relationships. But is Google, some guy at Google, your grocer, some colleague entitled? No. However, a criminal case may require obtaining such information and so the state may have a legitimate, conditional, and very selective claim to that kind of information in certain circumstances.
Privacy is necessary for human beings to flourish, at least in this life. As a practical matter, knowing something about someone can impede the good of both the person about whom something is known as well as the knower. It can negatively affect human relationships. Knowing the boundaries does require sound prudential judgement, of course, which is why if you're unsure, it can help to ask yourself what the justification for inquiring or disclosing is in a given situation. (Gossips are people who lack this sort of prudence and suffer from intemperate curiosity.)