I’m wondering: is there a good list of data privacy failure consequences?
There are good lists of breaches but few describing what happened to the people afterwards. Credit card theft resulting in a loss being the most obvious one.
Such concrete (real) examples would help me to argue with people who say: all this non-sense about data privacy. What would anyone want to do with your data anyways?
There isn't such a tight distinction between security and privacy. Consider the Ashley Madison leak. I don't mean to defend people who violate their SO's trust - that's unconscionable - but clearly this was both a privacy and a security issue, data was stolen and leaked which revealed really intimate information which ruined people's lives.
- a women start planning to have a child, her employer know that, she got fired before the conception, legally;
- you are someone who know his/shes knows his rights, no jobs for you since you are not easy to exploit;
- you have a certain political opinion, not nice toward the present government? You'll got hard career and all possible "issues", just like getting more traffic red lights than someone else, more police checks causing delays and so on.
The list is long. The point is: we can't design a society like a factory, we can't plan evolution beyond banal things, so we need noise, variability that nobody can master to ensure nothing can last too much impeding further evolution just because someone manage to grab a certain position of power and do want to end the history to remain there forever in a loop. That's why we need privacy, diversity, and so on.
Well, I know that, not too long ago, employers were asking prospective hires to give them their Facebook and Twitter credentials. I'm talking full login credentials. Other ones asked employees to friend them. I think a lot of HR departments also required employees to friend HR people.
I'm pretty sure that's documented. The courts slammed that drawer shut, pretty hard.
Something that might hit a little closer to home, here: When I was still looking for work, about four or five years ago, a couple of the companies asked me to tell them my HN ID (I'm not sure if I had joined here, back then).
That's one of the reasons that I try to behave well, here. I'm not looking for work, but a lot of y'all are. I try not to propagate fights (although it can be tough), because the person that really gets harmed, is the one attacking me. They are showing their ass, in front of potential employers and teammates, and, even though I might not like them, I don't want to play a part in their not getting a job.
Real cases are everywhere, in front of everyone, every day. For example:
Victims of domestic violence or stalking. Victims of personal vendettas or bigotry from figures in authority. Victims of exploitative employers. These victims have done nothing wrong and they need privacy.
All kinds of people are randomly distributed throughout all professions and strata of society. Politicians, police, lawyers, doctors, posties, real estate agents, chefs. All have great and terrible human representation.
Now think about a person you distrust/dislike the most in your life. Would you want to give them access to everything about you?
The type of person that you like least will eventually have access to your information. If you don't protect your privacy now, who will protect you then?
I'm suggesting that there doesn't need to be a punchy irrefutable post that wins the argument.
Anyone who interacts with a variety of humans on a regular basis has all of the proof they need that entrusting anonymous others (including corporate entities) with personal information is a bad idea.
The day that humans no longer swindle and scam each other, no longer become jealous or seek revenge, and no longer use power for personal gain at the expense of others is the day we can all freely share everything with each other without worry.
Beware a thing: in the modern world it's not "everybody knows about everybody" vs "nobody knows nothing about everybody", it's just: very few people know almost anything about everybody, while most do know next to nothing about them.
Not a useful argument; anyone making the "nothing to hide" argument is implicitly arguing the trustworthiness (or the low likelihood of a mistake impacting them) of the state/justice system. You and other members of the general public are not part of that.
This is also why the snippy "so you don't have (locks on your doors/blinds on your windows/etc.)?" comeback does not work.
"Officer" is indeed a subclass of "Person", but the former includes a StateAuthority mixin that modifies its acceptable and expected behavior in a number of ways that make it unreasonable to blindly substitute one for the other.
First, you have those who stormed the Capitol and were identified by the NYT based on their phones location [1]. You also have the Substack that used location data to publicly out a priest as gay [2].
You then have the companies selling location data of people who visit abortion clinics [3]. They obtain this location from SDKs that they deploy via apps you may already be using. And if you want to get more dystopian remember that Texas allows citizens to sue anyone for "aiding or abetting a post-heartbeat abortion" [4], meaning that driving your friend Rebeca to a clinic can land you in a lawsuit for at least $10k by people who do this as their day job.
Even if you're not sued, remember that companies have been reliably predicting whether you're pregnant for at least 10 years [5] and using it to influence your behavior in their favor. This one may be the one with the "least bad" consequences but, paradoxically, the one that better drives home the point since nothing here is criminal.
> I’m wondering: is there a good list of data privacy failure consequences?
The ultimate example is how 1940’s Germany used 1930’s Germany’s census data. In 1933 it didn’t seem so bad to tick a box with your religious affiliation …
The Netherlands as well. Dutch census religious affiliation data were used by the imposed regime 1940--45.
Several Dutch officials enacted wholesale destruction of those records as the occupation became obviously imminent, which saved many, though the Jewish population of the Netherlands fell from 154,887 in 1941 to 14,346 in 1947.
The point being it's not necessarily your own government you need be worried about.
In another variant on this, surveillance records kept by the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, a/k/a the Stasi) and Soviet KGB were acquired by successor governments (unified German and post-Soviet states including Ukraine). See: <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/unearthing-soviet-sec...>
(I'm trying without success to find a reference to the destruction of Dutch census records, though I'm pretty certain this did actually happen.)
There was a dedicated effort by the Dutch resistance to destroy the records of the civil registries. During the occupation, forged documents could be checked against the records in the civil registry. By bombing the civil registry office, the forged papers could no longer be validated against the civil registry, and would pass inspection.
Unless we’re talking about financial privacy, in which case many alleged privacy supporters will curiously switch sides and defend KYC, transaction tracking and other ways of controlling other people’s wallets.
A lot of people just defend the status quo no matter what it is, and the arguments for why things are the way they are now are what they teach in schools and even universities.
Most people also don't realize how ineffective KYC laws are. Studies have shown that they just don't work. Small time criminals use cash or barter, big time criminals infiltrate banks or have ties to international criminal organizations with their own shadow banking systems. It's just not a useful requirement and the significant costs outweigh the negligible benefits.
Creating a market for shadow banking systems is extra bad because then the large criminal organizations get the bank's margin which they can use to fund more criminal activity.
It's only then that we get to the privacy costs and chilling effects of putting everything people buy in a database. And the costs it imposes on marginalized populations. And the destruction of value of any service that can't exist because it would have to collect social security numbers from users or otherwise impose high transaction costs on low margin transactions.
I'm not entirely sure who the lobby for keeping them even is. People who don't know how ineffective they are? Banks who want to keep barriers to entry high? Just brute authoritarians who want to spy on everyone every way they can?
The problem with the "I've got nothing to hide" argument is it's not "you" who decides what is "right" or "wrong". The entity doing the "spying" determines what is right or wrong. "You" might think "x" is ok, however the "spying" entity may have the opposite view. And it is the "spying" entity's opinion that matters, not yours, because it always them that have the power and authority in determining what is "right" or "wrong". Moreover, definitions change on what is "right" or "wrong".
Example: in the 1930, Dutch municipalities would record ethnicity for their citizens. The argument was that ethnicity wasn't something you'd need to hide, and it could be useful should you need to identify yourself.
When in 1940 the German occupiers took over, those records turned out to be very useful for their genocide.
It makes sense that ethnicity would have been recorded as well, but FAFAIK the Germans mostly used the data on religious identity (i.e. which persons were a member of which church community).
The point still stands; any kind of private information like ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexuality - NONE of those are relevant to a government, and ANY of those can be used to identify and persecute people if there is a regime or law change aimed at any of those categories.
Tangentially related, it's why things like period trackers are dangerous too; the US has had a spate of anti-abortion laws, the data from those apps (if used) can be used to detect pregnancies and whether they have stopped prematurely. For example.
My reply wasn't meant to refute the parent's point. I wanted to clarify because in today's society ethnicity is a much more contentious data point than religion. Given the prevalence of race-related issues in the media it makes much more sense to a present-day mind to say "maybe we shouldn't be recording ethnicity" than to say "maybe we shouldn't record a person's religion".
The real problem is that this argument relies on people actually meaning “anything”. It’s a strawman that’s so good, you get people actually trying to argue it, but the real argument isn’t about absolute publicity of information, it’s about providing access to additional information as a means to investigate wrongdoing. Very few people are practically suggesting every single fact ought to be public about a person.
Besides, doomsaying that “anything could be illegal!” isn’t backed by anything real or lasting.
>"anything [harmful] could be illegal!" isn't backed by anything real or lasting
Are you serious? that's a pretty ahistoric view... Being jewish was illegal, being a free black person was illegal, shit, woman having freedom of medical procedure is illegal in some states today!
how on earth can you earnestly suggest things won't be made illegal that will harm people
Someone once said to me, it is easy to be enlightened when you have a full belly.
In the same vein, it is easy to grant social gains when in easy times. But we are in the liminal space between the boom of the 20th century and the blow back from same century of reckless growth.
Nowadays a lot of nationalistic rhetoric that would not have flown far has had a lot of traction over the last decade or so. And it is slowly becoming obvious that the frameworks for oppression are being constructed.
The idea that we can only go forwards with minor trips along the way is a very narrow interpretation of history. That the example given before was of the Nazis is especially accurate considering it came after the Weinmar Republic that was known to be particularly ahead of the times in terms of social progress and cultural facets. It could be argued that wouldn't be for almost another 70-80 years that they gained back what was taken away in next to now time.
Unfortunately, the one thing I have taken away from those that work as war correspondents - do not under estimate how fragile society is and how quickly people will turn against others to try and ensure personal safety.
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
- Albert Camus"
Cool. Real question, and truly think about it deep and hard: are you okay with being the martyr who ends up jailed, prosecuted, dead or what-have-you before we self correct?
These statements are very easy to make, but when push comes to shove the individuals saying it won't put their money where their mouth is. So, will you?
And that usually happens quickly and with zero casualties? I'm sure that Alan Touring would be thrilled to learn that years later his nation has stopped castrating gay people.
Progress also isn't linear, backlash over transgender identity has gotten worse recently. People are being prosecuted over abortions that would have been legal a year ago. None of the people who are in those positions are going to be comforted by knowing that eventually someday other people won't be attacked for the same reasons.
Self correction protects the future; privacy protects the present. They're not interchangeable.
Why do you presume the number of acceptable casualties is zero? We don’t apply that kind of logic to any other aspect of risk management, why would that be the bar here?
And no, privacy advocates claim privacy protects against the future, not the present. Their whole argument is, “what if stuff you like is made illegal in the future?!?!” with absolutely no tether to realit
> Why do you presume the number of acceptable casualties is zero?
Fair enough. What is the acceptable number of casualties then? Do you have a number of people in mind that you think would need to be killed or harmed before you would agree that privacy is worthwhile?
> And no, privacy advocates claim privacy protects against the future, not the present.
This is a pretty big misunderstanding of what we're saying. Privacy protects against future threats, yes. At the point when you are experiencing those threats, they will be in the present. And at that point, privacy will protect you. Whether you want to call that the future or the present, whatever. I don't care, it doesn't matter.
In contrast, self correction does not protect you. Self correction is about the overall direction of society -- at the point where you are threatened, whether that's a threat in the present or in the future, the tendency of society to eventually stop doing awful things is of no protection at all to you.
Privacy is not a substitute for social change, but social change is also not a substitute for privacy. Social change is the thing that happens after people die. If you want to protect the people who are actually dying (see above, maybe you don't think that's worthwhile) then you need privacy.
> with absolutely no tether to reality
Just as a quick sidenote, there are people being charged for previously legal abortions right now. Maybe you don't think those people are worth protecting in the short term and we should accept the downsides and rely on eventually society changing and say "oh well."
But that's very different than saying that the risk isn't real. The only way that you could say that "what if a thing you like is made illegal" doesn't have a basis in reality is if you really aren't paying attention to reality in the US right now. None of this is theoretical, people are very literally getting prosecuted for abortions right now because Facebook doesn't E2EE its messages.
How many people do you think is an acceptable level of loss for cars to be justified?
How many people need to die because their medical information wasn't available quickly enough to deliver life saving treatment in time?
Pedophiles are walking free right now because the criminal justice system can't gain access to their computers to prove what it otherwise painfully obvious; they're hurting children.
I can make exactly the same arguments you're making here, just in the opposite direction. That doesn't mean I'm right or you are; the argument that anyone being harmed means an idea is not worth doing is pointless and doesn’t provide anything remotely resembling a reasonable view into the issue, but pretending like any loss at all is unacceptable, such as you're doing here, is a farce.
> but pretending like any loss at all is unacceptable, such as you're doing here, is a farce.
There's a weird transformation that this conversation has gone through. As a reminder it started out with you saying "besides, doomsaying that 'anything could be illegal!' isn’t backed by anything real or lasting."
Which is just false. And I'm not sure where I or frankly anyone else in this thread has suggested that even just a single person being hurt means that privacy is an existential problem. Quite the opposite, I accepted the premise that there's a threshold, asked you what your opinion of that threshold was, and responded to you saying:
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
and
> Their whole argument is, “what if stuff you like is made illegal in the future?!?!” with absolutely no tether to realit[y]
by pretty objectively correctly pointing out that this doesn't change anything for anyone caught out in the current situation and that, yeah, things being made illegal in the future is a completely realistic concern with countless historical examples backing it up.
Of course we balance concerns about safety. I still use a phone and participate in society, I'm using my real name online right now. Ironically, I'm being less pseudonymous than you are right now. Very clearly I am not saying that a single person dying means we all need to go live in the woods.
But "what is an acceptable level of sacrifice for convenience" really doesn't have anything to do with the argument "I have nothing to hide." If someone dismisses concerns about car safety or medical accessibility or criminal activity by saying that those dangers aren't real, then they'd be very much in the wrong. And it's equally wrong to dismiss privacy concerns by saying that concerns about future erosion of rights "aren't tethered to reality." They are a thing that happens. They're real, just as real as car accidents. So no you don't have to stop driving, but you should wear a seatbelt, look both ways before you cross the street, and use an encrypted messenger on your phone.
The negative consequences of incomplete privacy are certainly real, they’re just not nearly as numerous as you seem to believe.
I can and I will dismiss the kinds of privacy concerns that rely on me being unable to understand how risk works, that rely on me falsely believing a solution to any problem exists with zero downside, that rejects any decision that has even one casualty.
I tried to show you how futile a game of, “your idea hurts people” is, but you seem incapable of moving past it. What a shame.
Holy crud, HN has been weird lately :) So I learned today that suggesting Facebook should encrypt its messenger app is actually just me embracing a fantasy about the nature of safety and risk.
I don't know I feel like you're probably 3 messages away from telling me that I should remove my smoke alarms from my house because house fires are uncommon and then calling me deluded because I wear a helmet when I go biking. I didn't realize that me taking 30 seconds to install Signal and then using it to chat with my friends was a futile rebellion against the natural order ;)
Okay apologies, I really don't mean to be snarky. But you've taken this conversation in a very strange direction that I don't think is representative of what anyone who rejects the "I have nothing hide" narrative actually believes. I would just point out once again, I am less pseudonymous than you are right now. I'm using my real name, I have more contact information listed on my profile. Very obviously I am willing to publish information about myself. So the context of this conversation really just does not align with this view you've gotten that the people disagreeing with you are just privacy absolutists who think any privacy risk at all is too large to take.
If you're saying that someone is rejecting all risk and refusing to accept a privacy system with any downside, and at the same time you notice that they're actively and deliberately publishing their real name and email address, then that should give you pause and it should make you step back and think, "maybe I don't understand what their argument is." Maybe when that person points out that risks exist they're saying something more than "any risk is too much risk".
You compared using Whatsapp to wearing a seatbelt; the problem with this analogy is that many, MANY more people die in car accidents than from... whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger.
You're failing to understand that the conversation does not end just because someone is harmed by something. You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything.
We can't get past this. You must either accept this as an observation about reality, or you will not understand whatever other direction this conversation may go.
> You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything.
Like I said, this is a completely incorrect reading of my position, and it should be obvious to you that it's incorrect because I'm taking privacy risks right now. If I believed that "a single negative outcome" was enough privacy risk to justify not doing something, I wouldn't be talking to you right now, I'd be living in the woods and shooting drones out of the sky. But I'm not, so very clearly you are missing something about my views.
> whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger.
Collective usage of E2EE makes it easier for other people to blend into the crowd and makes usage of E2EE messaging less suspicious. This is not exactly hard to understand and it's not abstract. It's the same reason why many cisgender people list pronouns when filling out profiles on new services -- it's a very low-cost way to make it so that transgender users aren't singling themselves out.
Collective normalization of E2EE also encourages people who aren't technically inclined and who are just following network effects to switch over to better messengers, which makes them safer without forcing them to become privacy experts.
And of course, when we talk about the "nothing to hide" fallacy, we mean more than "your actions as a stranger benefit me" -- we're pointing out that the risk analysis most people do about privacy risks is flawed and over-optimistic and advising you that you might want to redo that risk analysis. For comparison, you wearing a helmet when you ride your bicycle won't keep me safe, but the safety benefits to you outweigh the downsides and you should still probably wear one anyway. Because people feel invincible about accidents even though they're very much not.
Your argument relies on "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason not to do anything. Obviously I know you live incongruously with your argument; that's my entire point! Glad you're figuring that out, but that doesn't mean your argument suddenly has merit, just because you're aware of how bad it is.
I'm not missing anything, you're just failing to resolve your internal inconsistency.
Look, your risk analysis of privacy harms does not become accurate just because you say it is. Saying that this is "one single negative outcome" a bunch of times doesn't make it true.
Pretty much the entirety of recorded human history backs up the idea that privacy matters, including the present where state governments are currently campaigning hospitals and social platforms to identify transgender people and to prosecute abortions.
Your risk analysis is wrong. That's what people are pointing out to you. We're not privacy absolutists, obviously we are not privacy absolutists. We are not suddenly having a realization about incongruity, it's honestly just really silly to suggest that this entire disagreement boils down to me seeing one trans person die and suddenly thinking "never again, no cost is too great." Take a step back out of the weeds and think about whether it's actually likely that anyone believes that :) That is not and has never been the argument, I haven't seen anyone in this entire thread even in sibling comments make that argument.
What we've all been pointing out is that the eventual arc of justice in the universe is unhelpful to people who are suffering right now, and that your risk analysis about the likelihood of people being put into that position is wrong. But go on, tell me again that this is actually a deep philosophical disagreement and I haven't internalized that safety measures involve tradeoffs.
You can call me wrong, you can claim you’re not arguing that one casualty is too many, but your actual argument remains that any negative consequences of giving up some privacy for substantive benefit are infinitesimally small yet somehow not worth the real value provided.
Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is, and make a better one!
What you think is a minor risk is a much larger risk than you suppose. And your analysis of the downsides of privacy improvements are wrong as well:
It takes 30 seconds to install Signal. There is no substantive benefit to Facebook's messenger not being E2EE. Privacy is not the reason why it's hard for you to get a copy of your medical records or migrate accounts across services. There is no massive substantive social benefit to advertisers tracking you across the web, and your life is not going to suddenly get worse if you install an adblocker.
This is the equivalent of putting on a bicycle helmet, getting a vaccine, wearing a seatbelt. It's not hard and it doesn't hurt you and the risks of ignoring clearly established safeguards are greater than you think. Your math is wrong.
> Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is
:D That is one way to approach a discussion, but it's not one I feel particularly obligated to take seriously or treat respectfully. I'm not really interested in having an argument about whether or not I'm lying to you when I tell you what exactly I believe. That would be a pointlessly inane, obviously unproductive waste of time.
I didn't know we were allowed to just say what the other person believes and then double down when they explain otherwise. If that kind of nonsense is allowed, then I've got to say that I think it's really weird that you've been secretly objecting to privacy on purely religious grounds the whole time :)
Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk, and now exposed you can’t even actually articulate an alternative reason why privacy is so important.
> Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk
:shrug: Six million Jews would like a word with you.
If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
And again, the "benefit" that we're giving up by being more private is negligible. There's very little downside to encrypting messages or blocking ad networks from tracking people. The entirety of recorded human history disagrees with your risk analysis, in addition to pretty much every single 1st Amendment expert and minority advocacy/anti-hate group today. Your math is wrong.
> So you admit your argument is predicated on the number of people who are harmed.
What, yeah, of course it is. What on earth are you talking about, which part of "your math is wrong" didn't you understand?
Lack of privacy hurts people. Not one or two people, it hurts a lot of people. It might hurt you one day. And that's worth caring about. It's worth caring about because it's a lot of people. If you didn't realize that I was talking about risk/harms then you really didn't understand a word I was saying.
Yes, I'm talking about risk. Your math about the risk is wrong. It's not a gotcha that it's apparently taken you to this point in the conversation to understand that "your math is wrong" means "your analysis of the number of people that are hurt by lack of privacy is incorrect."
> and since then, society has improved in gigantic leaps and bounds.
Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> is no longer possible in the western world
:) Citation very, very much needed. We have a political party in America with members who are openly calling for the extermination of transgender identity, headed by a political ideologue who's currently being prosecuted for (essentially) attempting a coup. Despite that he's still favored to be the next presidential nominee of that party because the majority of that party doesn't view attempting a coup as disqualifying from office.
It is incredibly naive to believe that we are no longer capable of doing terrible things in America to oppressed identities or capable of building political and social apparatus to do those terrible things.
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
And as I said, that self correction is of no benefit whatsoever for the 6 million Jews that died. Self correction is not protection. Privacy is protection.
You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.
We don't have things like WW2 happen anymore, and living our life like the next Holocaust is just around the corner is paranoid and overly cynical.
We really did seem to learn that lesson. Your own example of trans rights is a great one; laws protecting trans people are enshrined in many US states already, and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.
We stumble, but we move forward, and without the loss of millions of people this time. Progress.
> You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
I'm curious, do you have any examples at all of equal-rights movements that haven't used privacy and anonymity to help protect themselves as they accomplished their goals? Because I can't think of any. Social progress isn't magic, it happens because people make it happen, and they very often rely on privacy to protect themselves during those transitions.
Do you think we could get rid of laws banning employers from asking about race/identity on job applications and it would just be fine and there would be no downsides? We got those laws for a reason -- namely because without them there would be a huge increase in discrimination. And again, ask any anti-discrimination advocacy group whether or not anonymity matters today for protecting marginalized people.
If your opinion is that anything less than the genocide of 6 million people is no longer worth worrying about, then that is a wild perspective to have that I think the vast majority of Americans (and people in general) would disagree with. Privacy did not become irrelevant after WW2 ended.
----
> and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.
Citation needed. Anti-trans legislation has accelerated in many states, not deaccelerated. It's by no means certain that that the situation won't get worse. A reminder that people said "the courts will shut it down" about abortion-rights challenges too.
In the meantime, doxing and violence against transgender people is at a nearly all-time high and people are stalking doctors.
Ask the transgender community sometime whether or not they think that privacy matters for them. I guarantee they will not agree with your assessment of the situation.
> "Across the country, we’re seeing a clear and unanimous rejection of these laws as unconstitutional, openly discriminatory and a danger to the very youth they claim to protect,"
10/75 is an overwhelming rejection to you? See https://translegislation.com/, bills are getting through and the pace at which they're being proposed is speeding up, not slowing down:
> 2023 marks the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation in the U.S. In just one month, the U.S. doubled the number of anti-trans bills being considered across the country from the previous year. We've seen familiar themes: attacks on gender-affirming care, education, athletics, birth certificates, religious discrimination, and other categories documented in our 2022 anti-trans legislation overview.
----
What makes this argument particularly ridiculous is -- ask every single one of these groups and advocacy fighters what they think of privacy and every single one of them will give you the same answer: it's an essential right that matters for protecting minorities. Has the ACLU stopped fighting for privacy because we've apparently defeated transphobia?
Your evidence that privacy no longer matters is an organization that spends an enormous amount of time advocating for privacy rights for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. If you're going to quote an ACLU article on the direction of transphobia, consider what they are actually saying about privacy, both in regards to transgender issues and to issues like abortion:
> As a school administrator, you have a legal obligation to maintain the privacy and safety of your students, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning
> The lack of strong digital privacy protections has profound implications in the face of expanded criminalization of reproductive health care. In light of these breathtaking and authoritarian attacks on bodily autonomy, we must fight with new urgency to ensure that people maintain control over their personal information. If we fail, the repressive surveillance techniques and powers that police and prosecutors have for decades used to wage the racist wars on drugs and terrorism will be marshaled to track, catalogue, and criminalize pregnant people and those seeking basic information about reproductive health issues, putting tens of millions of people at risk of police harassment and worse.
When you say that privacy no longer matters because we've beaten transgender discrimination, first consider checking if there are any transgender advocacy groups that agree with you. The people that you're arguing are on top of this and that will prevent us from ever doing anything horrible ever again -- they all think that privacy matters. It might be a good idea to research why they think that?
I'm just trying to imagine how you think it would have gone down in Nazi Germany if a Jewish group tried to sue the Nazi party for their oppressive treatment of the Jewish people.
How you see the Holocaust as a parallel to what trans people are going through is a wild over-exaggeration of the situation, though it makes sense your argument needs such a thing as it can't stand on its own.
Trans people are not, in any way, shape or form, being oppressed to anything even remotely approaching the degree Jewish people experienced in the Holocaust, and the idea that "if only trans people could have more privacy this wouldn't be an issue" is so nonsensical it borders on delusion.
> How you see the Holocaust as a parallel to what trans people are going through is a wild over-exaggeration of the situation, though it makes sense your argument needs such a thing as it can't stand on its own.
We don't really need to imagine a hypothetical around that because we can look at the history of antisemitism after WW1 and see the parallels directly. Nazi growth was largely dismissed by political opponents of the Nazi party (https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-the-holocaust/articles/antisemit...)
> In the audio clip above, Eli Fachler remembers that many Germans he knew saw antisemitism as a sign of ignorance or lack of culture. In fact, many Germans did not take Hitler seriously and saw the Nazis as a fringe movement that would be short-lived – even when the Nazi Party won 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections, a result which made it the largest party in the German Parliament. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, many politicians still thought that they would be able to control him and form a functioning government.
"It would be impossible for these people to seize power, we have legal challenges in front of that happening" was the overwhelming sentiment before the Nazi party seized power. There are striking similarities between early responses to the Nazi party and the attitudes of people today towards modern fascist movements in America. Consider that many Jews in early Germany during Hitler's rise to power did not think that mass discrimination against them was feasible or likely.
----
But at the same time, holy heck I'm sorry I even mentioned the holocaust if that's the only thing you're now able to think about. For the 3rd time at this point:
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
Is your position somehow that none of these current events count because they haven't reached the basic threshold of 6 million deaths where privacy suddenly starts mattering? There is enough harm being done to enough people in modern America today to justify caring about this stuff.
> and the idea that "if only trans people could have more privacy this wouldn't be an issue" is so nonsensical it borders on delusion.
Nobody has said that, neither I nor the many anti-hate groups and advocacy groups whose privacy opinions you are ignoring.
> Western society learned the lesson from those awful events; they’re therefore not going to happen again.
"But it couldn't happen here" is so widely understood as a fallacy in thinking about how fascist movements operate and spread that it's become a meme at this point. There is no reason to believe that America would be incapable of mass-discrimination against a minority group.
But for the 4th time now, my more relevant response to your dismissal of the holocaust is:
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
> "because it harms one person ever, we can’t accept it"
Not a single one of the things I mentioned above only affects only a single person. The current harms in America today are sizable enough and severe enough to justify privacy. None of this is niche. If you think that current discrimination is something that only affects one or two people, you are burying your head in the sand.
Anti-discrimination privacy rulings did not get affirmed by the Supreme Court because it was a niche issue. The numerous anti-hate groups today (who all collectively agree with my point of view that modern privacy matters) are not focusing on niche issues. The essential privacy protections that allow for modern advocacy that you seem to take as a given are not niche issues and they affect huge swaths of the population.
Your math is wrong.
> And to be clear, the only person dismissing the holocaust here is you, by equating it to something completely different.
Ok either this is a niche issue or its the next holocaust. It can’t be both.
Your complete inability to be consistent in your argument kind of does my work for me. Look at the contortions you have to make to argue against the simple idea that western society isn’t doomed to repeat its worst mistakes.
If you had a good argument you’d have given it by now.
> Ok either this is a niche issue or its the next holocaust. It can’t be both.
Your lower bounds on what qualifies as "not niche" is the hecking holocaust? Holy crud.
The holocaust was one of the single largest mass-death events in modern history. It is possible for a thing to be serious while not being worse than the holocaust. That is not a binary.
> Which is just another form of: “because it harms one person ever, we can’t accept it.”
What's your definition of the word "niche" then?
Modern privacy violations harm enough people that they are worth taking seriously. They affect large swaths of society and bringing them up is not at all equivalent to saying that because something harms one person we can't accept it. Enough people get harmed by lack of privacy today to cross any reasonable threshold for justifing caring about privacy.
Incidentally, maybe re-read my comments, because I'm honestly really genuinely confused how you thought that I was arguing that modern privacy violations were niche. My consistent point every single comment has been than modern privacy violations are serious and affect multiple people. I'm at loss what you think I was saying other than "this stuff is a mainstream serious issue that affects a lot of people."
> I also didn’t bring up the holocaust, that was also you.
:) Yep, and my analogy stands and is supported by the vast majority of civil rights and social activist groups today, including groups like the ACLU and ADL. If you think the comparison is inappropriate, go argue with them. But you're right, you didn't bring up the holocaust; all you said was that everything that's happened since the holocaust belongs in the same category as saying "because it harms one person ever, we can't accept it."
Which... holy crud, you need to pay attention to the world if you think that.
And? Unless your cutoff point for "bad enough to care about privacy" is the literal holocaust, that doesn't change a single thing about what I've said in a single one of my comments.
It turns out that amazingly, it is possible for multiple things to both be very bad -- bad enough to prompt action and concern -- while not being the exact same amount of bad. It is remarkable, but true. For example, sometimes you might put your hand on a stove and it might be hot enough to burn your skin, but also not as hot as the surface of the heckin sun -- and somehow your hand will still be burned. It's just incredible the way that continuums work.
----
Look, I've donated $5 to the EFF in your name, which I'm hopeful will allow me to more easily internalize that convincing one singular person online that privacy didn't become obsolete when Hitler died is not a good use of my time or energy. Nobody is going to read down this far so there's nobody else at this point who's sake I'm arguing for; and HN is enough of a privacy-supportive forum that very few people on here needed to be convinced you were wrong anyway.
In contrast to things like the civil rights movement, transgender rights, abortion rights, and so on, this argument we're having right now is actually something that only affects a single person and is not worth the trouble. I shouldn't have gotten pulled into it; I make this mistake far too often. And I think that $5 is enough to offset any potential social impact you would have in this thread.
Okay argument aside, I appreciate the donation. I do kind of find the EFF to be insufferable in their outreach (hyperbolic), but that's a really nice thing to do. Thanks.
Fundamentally, I think we disagree on whether or not privacy is worth the cost of the people harmed by its existence. I don't think a surveillance state is necessary, but I also don't think bad people should be able to operate with impunity. I trust the American judicial system to provide warrants when necessary, and I believe such an "invasion" of privacy is both necessary and important to keep our society safe.
I further think it's a straw man when pro-privacy advocates pretend like their opposition believes everything should be out in the open; my original point was that nobody thinks everyone's laundry should be fully public. Nobody actually thinks "I've got nothing to hide" (the submission's title). That's not the opposite of total privacy, the "opposing" view is much less extreme.
The question isn't about whether the trans-identified have their basic rights. Of course they do, like every other citizen. It's about whether they should be granted extra rights, particularly those that override the existing rights of women.
For example, should a trans-identifying male criminal have the right to be incarcerated in women's prisons? Some female prisoners have already suffered rapes and sexual assaults from such males, in states that granted this right to the them.
It's another example of the balance of rights, just as privacy rights are.
Also, the feminist activists who are advocating for women's sex-based rights are largely anonymous or pseudo-anonymous due to potential repercussions from vindictive men who oppose them. Online privacy in particular is vital for their activist movement to proceed without intimidation. It works both ways.
I live in the UK and when I raise concerns about government surveillance here people often say, "I've got nothing to hide".
I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion.
It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey" (Toxteth being a fairly rough inner-city area of Liverpool).
The teen he was insulting was dead and unable to take offence, but the police officer on Reddit at the time took offence and decided to prosecute the guy anyway.
I'm bringing this up because I don't think most people in the UK realise this. Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK.
We all have something to hide when what's right and wrong is this arbitrary.
Legal notes:
I do not agree with the views of the Redditor referenced in my comment. I understand how someone may be offended by what he said, but disagree specifically with it being an offence to state an offensive position online.
I also do not agree with the behaviour autistic child mentioned in my comment. I understand that being autistic is not an excuse for being offensive. Again, I am only bringing this up because I do not believe it should be an offence to offend.
The offensive language used in my comment were direct quotes used specifically to make a point.
> It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey"
"
Rowan O’Connell, 23, was hit with a fine by magistrates today over the sick outbust following the death of Mzee, 18.
The teenager, described by his mother as a “gentle giant”, died after becoming unwell while detained by police officers at Liverpool ONE in July.
O’Connell took to social media website Reddit, where he made baseless allegations, labelling Mzee a “good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey”.
> or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution
That's not mild, and you either know it or should know it.
> I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK.
No link eh? What a surprise.
---
edit: this isn't about the rights/wrongs of what was said in this case but your (deliberately?) incomplete description of them. I actually share your concern about freedom of speech but twisting facts doesn't build your case well.
I don't understand your point. You both said the exact same thing: "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey", except you also said the guy added "Who gives a fuck?" which basically means "who cares?". Does adding a "who cares?" make the originally phrase much different?
I wouldn't annoy a police officer before the Pan-Opticon was installed anyway.
When a Cop in the 90s arrests a guy because the cop got annoyed at something the 'suspect' said, you had the option to blame it on the cop's thin-skinned personality. Now annoyed cops can use the law directly.
The UK police implicitly allowing retributive online abuse is subtly humorous.
> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution.
"will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".
And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace.
They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction.
And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope
I don’t mind that - if someone wants to tap Joe Bloggs’ phone then that’s fine. Get a court order with evidence that he might be doing something wrong
It’s scalable surveillance that worries me. Suddenly cctv which is pulled in case of a crime becomes constantly monitored, with face, gait, clothing, and other types of automated recognition, gathering data on everyone, pumping that data into pattern matchers.
This is the dark HN fantasy of scaleable British panopticon surveillance again.
The police have surprisingly little constantly available CCTV. Police and national government control a minuscule fraction of the CCTV in the UK. (Local government a bit more, but it’s town centre anti-nuisance stuff —- pickpockets —- and a few secure buildings, and the police do not have routine access to it). There isn’t the money, the intent or the legal framework to so what you’re suggesting, and nor, I would say, do we “love it”.
British police, significantly, police by consent, are operationally independent of HM government, and cannot (currently) prosecute without the aid of the (equally independent) CPS. In England there isn’t even one single police force, and unlike the FBI, no normal part of the police is a part of a government department. (MoD Police are, I guess, but their remit is military policing).
I was responding to the somewhat hysterical parent post to correct the conflation of: the police literally are not the government, do not spy for the government, and do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.
Does any arm of the state surveil the populace in any sense? It falls within MI5’s remit to spot domestic threats. Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight.
We only know what the NSA does because a person who leaked highly confidential documents and is now a refuge for the crime of showing the world what the US govt does in secret.
Do you really think the UK govt, or any govt, doesn't use the cloak of security and classification to do questionable things?
I am just observing that the scope of GCHQ’s abilities are obviously limited compared to the NSA (unless they have the most cost-efficient IT infrastructure in the world, and we don’t do cost-efficient government IT here even now). The budget just isn’t there for them to operate the way the NSA does.
The thing you’re missing is that GCHQ spies on Americans (Foreigners from the UK perspective) using the NSA’s money, then it shares the findings from the spying with the NSA under an intelligence sharing agreement. GCHQ is mostly an outsourced wing of the NSA.
> "...Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight."
"The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, however, ruled on 30 January 2023 that MI5 broke key legal safeguards by unlawfully retaining and using individuals’ private data gathered via covert bulk surveillance." - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365529894/MI5-unlawfully....
It's a lovely idea, but Peelian principles are currently only paid lip-service. People are trying to drag it back to something approaching that, but it's not the current actual situation, particularly in London. (Kettling, etc.)
> are operationally independent of HM government,
> the police literally are not the government,
> do not spy for the government,
Again, in the sense of "political party currently in control of Parliament", yes. But they're literally the enforcers of the law -- and their meaning of the law. People not in Parliamentary systems have a broader, and far more useful meaning of "government" -- those governing, determining what is going to be punished and what won't. If you're actually stuck on term "government" in the partisan meaning, please give me some other term to refer to the coherent actions of the state. The bureaucracy and enforcement arms actually do govern, regardless of whether they're doing so at the behest of particular partisan guidance (though sure, that's worse in terms of being able to politically course correct). An arrest and detention whilst CPS sorts out taking to the next level is actually a punishment. Hence the quote "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
> do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.
I have to ask… do you disagree with prosecuting offensive comments or not? You say it doesn’t happen often and they can’t enforce it. But do you think its a bad thing? Doesnt seem that way. The point is it shouldn’t be legal.
Do I think offensive comments can be prosecuted in practice? Yeah, I do. Just as there are limits to free speech in the USA, there are comments that can have consequences.
The bar should be set high, and in general it is, but no, I don’t think hate speech is inherently free speech, for example.
The US way of doing things is not a) the only way of doing things, b) intrinsically the best way of doing things or c) trending in the right direction. Free speech is not something with a magical clear definition, and I think it goes without saying that we at least try to take incitement to actual race hate a little more seriously. We can set the bar differently; we have.
The problem in the UK is not a rash of prosecutions for offensive comments because despite what the parent comment says, they rarely come to trial. There is no enormous procession of these cases, and knobends are actually pretty free to be knobends here. Speech is free, newspapers don’t get raided when they happen to investigate the local police chief.
The problem at the moment is that the guidance is in flux, and too much time is wasted determining that something won’t be prosecuted. (Well, that’s the main problem. The secondary problem is the USA exporting its newest renewable resource, alt-right trolling, to every corner of the English speaking world, exhausting everyone’s patience.)
Right ok, so the reason why you're taking issue doesn't come from a principled place, but because you just so happen to believe these people should be prosecuted.
The thing is, few of these cases make it to trial, because the CPS has to demonstrate it’s in the public interest.
The result is that the police are still opening investigations they are asked to, and the CPS is still examining them; it’s a lot of energy spent on no outcome.
That is the actual problem, not the prosecutions, which remain unusual from what I can see.
There needs to be better guidance on the relevant legal standards. Separately we need to do something about (civil) libel laws, but that is a parallel and not criminal law issue.
I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy.
But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed.
It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration.
The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.
I am assuming it is just a random police officer reading Reddit on a personal basis and deciding to act on evidence of a crime (either because they are the local force or by passing it on). Police aren’t ever really off duty in this sense.
Why assume a surveillance mechanism when police are individuals who also use the more popular sites?
It's not assuming a surveillance mechanism, it's _describing_ one. Individual police keeping their eyes open _is_ a surveillance mechanism. Admittedly, just about the most banal one possible, but the anti-social behavior it's catching is also the most harmless. But the bad law does actually make it a problem.
I like that officers in the UK are unarmed. I'm sure there are other distinct differences in how the UK does policing from other countries that are worth pointing out that make a meaningful difference.
But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case. The government works on behalf of and with the consent of the people too! When you get sent to prison for an insult on social media, it's all done in the name of (some of) your fellow citizens.
Much of this is about individual freedom vs the oppression of the collective. The operators who are tasked to enforce the collective's norms have personal decision making power, and power invariably corrupts.
> you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration.
What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?
> But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case.
Not really. The specific culture of “policing by consent” that is foundational to policing (one of the Peel principles) is still really strongly defended as a matter of policing identity here (as it is in Canada and to a lesser but still noticeable extent Australia). The US police kits itself out with secondhand military equipment from the armed forces. I suspect in some situations this makes them a more effective law enforcement machine but tooling up with military equipment suggests a significant break from Peel principles.
> What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?
It means that the situations where our police overreact are the situations where they are outnumbered and in confrontation (riots etc.). It means the opposite of them being personally vindictive (though some are and they are depressingly hard to fire)
Again with your links. Is it performance art? Are you an AI aggregator?
(The violence against women thing is serious but it’s not a question of law enforcement behaviour or brutality. That is about the international problem of police being hard to fire when they are awful individuals in private; it’s an ongoing problem that is being addressed here through campaigns, and I am afraid I do not remotely believe that domestic and sexual violence is less of a problem in the USA. Canada takes this more seriously)
As opposed to your arguments, who are solely based on your individual statements, and advocacy for the MI5 being a well supervised mass surveillance organization?
I don't understand the point of this kind of argument from absurdity. It's not as clever as you think.
Also it's worth observing that a possible outcome is the majority of people wouldn't want their government overthrown, and the police should act to prevent it. Another is that the police wouldn't preserve a government that does not have the slightest mandate. There is no benefit to the police to do that. (Do you expect the FBI and state police forces to maintain an actually illegitimate US government? Because even from outside, I don't).
Again: Britain runs on realpolitik, not extremist absolutes. At no point would we on a cultural level feel it important celebrate "the peaceful transfer of power", for example. It's just not how our minds work. Our police are small and unarmed. It's just a very different place and the fact that HNers don't really understand it doesn't help with the oversimplifications.
(FWIW, nobody ever needs to overthrow a British government. The party in power usually manages this from within.)
> for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality...
They really do. Not just council cctv cameras, which are less problematic - any local Facebook group is full of pictures from ring doorbells of people who look like “trouble” who have the wrong skin colour, wrong clothing, wrong age etc.
This is the norm and is embraced by a nation of curtain twitchers.
That is not the surveillance panopticon that HNers imagine.
That is "Little Brother" -- prurient neighbour-watching.
Yeah, Little Brother is everywhere. (It's the bigger threat to our culture, IMO).
But this isn't a UK-specific problem. The USA, for example, has Homeowner Associations, which tie neighbourhood-watch curtain-twitching and petty compliance to personal freedoms, property values, paint colour and lawnmowing. The average suburban person in the UK arguably has more freedom from curtain-twitching busybodies than in the USA (where 26% of the population live in an HOA or condo association)
The British police do not have warrantless power to just lazily aggregate Ring doorbell footage or any other such thing (they may have faster access to cloud content with a warrant, but I suspect it is probably still faster to just look at the doorbells in the immediate vicinity and ask permission).
They do however have the ability to ask homeowners for ring footage without a warrant, and British homeowners on the whole are eager to inform on their neighbours
> "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".
Yes, sorry – you're right. It happens occasionally. If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.
> If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.
We have a whole small news channel dedicated to it now! ;-)
Offensiveness on the whole is not policed, at all. (Except by Facebook, of course.)
Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime can end up policed. The guidance around that is still poorly defined, so it's very unusual to see a charge or a conviction and it's for sure wasteful of resources.
I'm obviously not arguing that it's always a good idea to prosecute when people are just offended -- of course it's not remotely a good idea to have that standard. But I do think we in this country should be allowed to draw a slightly different line on racism or hate speech or trolling/griefing/abuse campaigns without being insulted for our lack of "principle", which is the routine HN argument.
It is, in my estimation, unprincipled to stand around and do nothing while people are harassed online, driven from their online activities, doxxed, abused with poster and letter writing campaigns, or incited against by conspiracy newspapers. Freedom of speech can have different limits than those chosen by the US constitution without being morally defective.
> Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime
The larger question is, how is this even possibly a thing?
That there are legal liabilities that are wholly dependent on the internal emotional state of another person is absolutely insane. How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?
> How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?
Because that isn't the standard. Why do you imagine it is? There you are assuming that Brits are mentally enfeebled. Standard HN position.
Look, just because the USA draws this nice simple extreme bright line doesn't mean it's magically the right line or that it works particularly well.
There is a coupling between your obsession with absolute freedom of speech and your obsession with absolute rights to bear arms that leads to you arming yourself in arguments that could be resolved better over a cup of tea.
Racist language isn't just offensive, for example -- it reinforces racist conduct and can be seen in that wider context. There's no reason to assume there's a freedom to be racist in actions in a country that still has racial divides; I'm not sure why "speech" is excluded from those actions. It can rise to the level of harassment. Trolling and griefing is a massive social problem; free speech shouldn't protect you if you make someone's life a misery even only online with entirely broadcast speech.
We (sometimes! actually unusually!) deal with this at the level of misdemeanour (magistrates courts).
The USA has been known to prosecute jaywalking and can't even deal with swatting -- a means of using overkeen armed police who can only perform conflict resolution if they are armed like soldiers to potentially accidentally murder someone at distance -- so I think perhaps it's a little churlish to come after us because we in our crowded little country think being rampantly offensive to large numbers of people sometimes rises to the level of misdemeanour.
There's two separate issues here. Privacy should be a right, I agree. But also we shouldn't tolerate our countries becoming authoritarian police states. It's already happened in the UK early, Australia and Canada are well on the way, and the US isn't far behind. Good privacy as a substitute for a government that isn't batshit crazy is not going to work in any event. Advocate privacy, but also advocate not letting giving power to insane elements of our society like this.
I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious.
Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system that throws the book routinely and a 90% conviction rate, or prosecutors who run for election on promises to be ever tougher. Ours is not the country with three strikes laws, death penalties, tent prisons run by fascist antiheroes, rampantly profiteering private prisons, corrupt local sheriffs, newspapers getting raided when they investigate the local police chief, Stand Your Ground and SWATting.
Yeah. We overpolice people being rude. It matters when you have the equivalent of one fifth of the population of the USA crammed into a country a bit smaller than Michigan.
Batshit crazy is clearly subjective, right? Try looking at things from a different perspective.
If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance?
Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be.
If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.
We don’t really have it in the way people in the US and those places influenced by their perception have come to believe. My experience is that US people tend to think that the police can follow you all over the place in real time using cameras. They cannot. They might be able to get the legal right to CCTV footage of all sorts of cameras but they will have to have the paperwork and knock on doors, not unlike the way they could in the USA. This is regulated by law.
Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded.
> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state
Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture.
So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate.
I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.
> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.
Is it still a police state if you are breaking three laws every day?
> I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion.
the guy publically posted a racist comment in the UK where there is not an unlimited right of free speech and anti-social behavior is regulated. I don't see the privacy concern. I prefer an unlimited right of free speech, but I don't call it privacy. This guy did have something to hide, shoulda kept it hidden.
Where does have an unlimited right of free speech?
Because once you start threatening politicians in the US see how far it gets you. Post a picture of yourself with an AR15 and a comment of “looking for Biden” and see how well that first amendment works.
I'm very charitable so perhaps that's why we disagree here, but I didn't read his comment as racist personally. That said, I understand the use of the word "monkey" could have been used with racist connotations, but the burden of proof would be on you to proof that instead of assuming guilt.
But either way he wasn't charged with being a racist. And outside of being a member of an extremist group I don't believe it's actually illegal to be a racist in the UK. It's illegal to be offensive. And that's what he was ultimately prosecuted for.
turns out, you do not decide what and on whom is the burden of proof; I'm just telling you what (obviously) happened. You may be fine with being oblivious, I'd just recommend you then also be less opinionated.
There was also a well publicised case where a mother was arrested in front of her children after misgendering a trans person on Twitter. The case was eventually thrown out but it seems the UK police have far too much power and flexibility in terms of what they can arrest someone for.
The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now!
So how do you codify this? Legislation can't have specific words and actions in it, it would be out of date before it became law!
So to target "offensive things", depends upon the opinion of the officers, the prosecutor, and so on! And can change at a moments notice!
Oh bewoe to thee, which does not watch twitter and be ware of new words this week!
Here's an example. Where I grew up, colloquially, women were called 'chicks' and men 'boys'. "What are you chicks/boys up to", one might say.
This was used by extreme feminists too, with zero objection.
Flash forward a few years, and in a city 1000km away, I started to describe how I was deeply impressed with the clarity of <female author>, she's a chick to watch.
Zero offense at home. None. New city? All the women, and some men in the room, went ballistic.
Note that:
* I was complementing the intellect of a person
* The tone and mannerism I used, was as if I said "woman to watch"
Point is, a word which was encouraged and approved by feminists I grew up with, used 1000km away in the same province of my country, meant I was an anti-feminist, woman hater.
And how do you legislate that?!
And... what you say in one place, can be dangerous in another, all with no ill intent!
> The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now!
Just don't make laws apply retroactively. Sounds like a trivial problem with a trivial solution. A woman misgendered etc doesn't matter that it was ok 20 years ago. It's not ok now and she did it now.
Can we just agree to disagree? Does anyone need to be charged with a criminal offence over that?
If you feel motivated to take female hormones and chop ya dick off, you’ve got problems, but being called a man really isn’t one of the ones worth worry about.
This still presumes that there is an accepted, official version of any specific language, and that all must adopt it, lest they court disaster.
The absurdity of trying to police language, is absolutely ridiculous. It stops nothing. For example, someone transitions from male to female. They want to be called a woman.
On twitter, I say 'Yes, you are a "woman"'. Note the quotes. What is the implication? Surely sarcasm, or an attempt to delegitimize the reference.
Are we going to send people to jail for quotes?
Are we going to be examining sentences for commas, quotes, and more?
And when is it an offense?
More so, who decides the rules? A committee of people from all walks of life? And who updates them?
After all, it was derogatory to call anyone "gay" 20 years ago, and you could be sued as a newspaper for saying so, and being wrong.
But now there is nothing wrong with being gay, so it is not hateful, and malicious to call someone gay.
Who manages the bad words?
And who informs everyone?
Most people in the US don't read twitter. Don't spend all day on Facebook. Many have no idea that "pronouns" are a thing.
If you look at twitter and Facebook, you'd think this stuff is all people talk about. If you talk to the average citizen, they rarely think about it, talk about it, or care.
So who updates them with this info, and, what words are ok this week?
This kind of language takes any presumption of good faith on your part. You cannot possibly believe that these kind of changes happen on a weekly basis, and yet you imply it in making your argument.
For context, I'm generally sympathetic to the "I've got nothing to hide" people
I find your example illustrates the point . The UK has insane libel laws
The sane solution would be to address these laws, not to create mechanisms for people to arbitrarily evade laws
A lot of pro privacy arguments seem to boil down to "well we should make it a bit easier for people to break the law, cus maybe the laws are just bad". This line of reasoning just feels really unsatisfying..
The UK passes roughly 33 acts of parliament per year, and 3,000 Statutory Instruments. What other concern is so pressing that passing one act of parliament would render the nation unable to complete it?
Your argument is rendered completely null by your flaccid half-apology at the end.
If you have something to say, say it and stand by it, or get out of the way.
What offensive language? Monkey? Was the guy black? One does have to admit some darker skinned people do look a little similar to gorillas. So what. That’s not an incitement to violence.
And the lesbian cop, she is a lesbian right? Who cares! How is that relevant to anything. A simple “don’t be a bellend” response should have covered it.
Sheesh! Some people really just need some bigger problems if the only things they feel motivated to act against is some low level name calling.
I think the person who said a kid deserved to die is a pos and he maybe needed his ass beat, but I can’t understand how anyone can be charged with hate speech for talking shit about a dead person. Who’s rights were violated there? Did it get thrown out? Maybe I’m obtuse and such a thing is not out of the ordinary.
No. He pleaded guilty to "sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature" and was fined accordingly.
At the end of the day what he said was indecent and therefore is illegal in the UK. Perhaps he could have fought it, but I believe he would have needed to argue that a reasonable person wouldn't find his comments indecent, and that would probably be difficult.
The larger point here is that anyone who gives an opinion online here in the UK is at risk of something similar happening. It depends less on the opinion and far more on the subjective nature of what is and isn't offensive. For example I could say some highly offensive things, but so long as I say them about Nigel Farage or Piers Morgan I'd be unlikely to be charged. I'd argue these laws are very subjectively policed and typically used to against people with political opinions that are not considered "acceptable". For example, it's often used against feminists who argue in favour of women-only spaces since this is considered transphobic and hateful by some.
You're asking whether the ends justify the means; you should think about that yourself. Also, it's a slippery slope, and the end result of that has been philosophised about in media like 1984, where people lost the privacy of their own home, or Minority Report, where people lost the privacy of their own mind.
There is a kind of sleight of hand at work in this counterargument, which is that nobody is advocating for a secret, extrajudicial, arbitrary set of rules about what is allowed and what isn't. Even if I say I'm OK with the government reading my email, all the work is ahead of them to prove specific charges in a court of law, should I catch their interest. The spy agency does not, in fact, get to decide what's right and wrong. The existence of a surveillance state does not imply the existence of a secret police with extrajudicial powers.
The first thing that authoritarian and fascist states create is the police with extra judicial powers. Like flies and shit, they are always found together.
Not sure I see how it's relevant here, since we're granting that the spy agency in this case has every right to gather evidence. The point is that they don't get to unilaterally decide if that evidence constitutes a crime, which is what the original comment suggested.
At Def Con the EFF had a talk on just this addressing abortion rights and the means of the state to use your digital footprints against you if you decide to go to a other state for services.
I guess the saying should be "you may not have anything to hide until the moment you do"
And then it's too late. Like, early 1900's, it was quite common for people to have their religion listed in your government records or ID. But then one religion became persecuted and hunted down.
There's a few commended civilian heroes whose contribution was that they burned or otherwise destroyed records like these, like Willem Arondeus who bombed the Amsterdam public records office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Arondeus)
Are you: Jewish? Trans? Gay? A woman? Pregnant? Black? Brown? A furry? Muslim? Christian? Rich? Poor?
Need I go on? All these groups have at one time or another (including now) needed to hide. This is a forum full of techies, and I'm sure lots of people don't want to tell everyone they are a techie right away (remember when you'd get punched if you wore Google Glasses?), or talk about their income.
If you aren't willing to openly publish your bank statements and browser history, you got something to hide. Friends, family, government, foreign governments, big tech, church, whatever. You probably got something to hide.
We just got to stop equating hiding things with doing something nefarious. I don't shut the door when I poop because I'm hiding illegal activities, I just want privacy.
And that's just the current list of groups / identifiers; this may change over time as well. Like, right now right-wing peoples are terrified / fearmongering that being white and straight will become a targeted minority.
It isn't just the visibility side of privacy, it is the latent risk of all the stored information that is being tracked and analysed because many of the organisations stalking you through your life are not terribly good at keeping that information secure and some of them are actively selling it around to any bidder.
Even if you think that you have nothing specific to hide, identity fruad can be a signifiant risk factor.
The problem with your point is it misses the ACTUAL meaning of "I've got nothing to hide". What it actually means is "I'm more average and less likely to be targeted than you". Or "I have less to fear that you, and I'm more worried about you or think I have more to gain from non-averages people being persecuted, than I have to lose from it being used against normies like me".
This is not the only problem. By giving up too much information, one also endangers the privacy of others. Ones own actions affect others. Those others can be journalists for example. I don't think I need to provide a list of all countries, where being a journalist can be a threat to ones own life.
In addition, "I've got nothing to hide" means precisely "I've nothing to my detriment". Needless to say, there is no such thing as a person who has nothing to his or her detriment. Of course, it is impossible to accurately know or predict one's disadvantage precisely. In essence, the removal of privacy is the deprivation of the right to remain silent in order to avoid such predictable and unpredictable situations.
"The argument that, Hey, I don't mind you listening to my phone calls, I have nothing to hide, is not an argument for this. You don't know anybody who does this for a living claiming that that's a good argument. It's a horrible argument. As Americans, we deserve that private space."
I got through 16 pages of the article, and he hadn't gotten to the point yet. He was summarizing previous articles he'd written. I understand that he's trying to steelman the "nothing to hide" argument, and has dispensed with the usual retorts (ably summarized in this thread so far). I'd like to know what his real response actually is. Did anybody get through the whole thing?
So much this. "I apologize for writing such a long essay; I did not have time to write a shorter one."
This is probably too brief, but here's Claude's take on a summary:
Here is a one page summary of the article "I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel J. Solove:
Solove argues that the "nothing to hide" argument, which contends that there is no threat to privacy if a person has nothing embarrassing or illegal to conceal, stems from a narrow conception of privacy. He proposes a pluralistic framework for understanding privacy, grounded in Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances. Privacy violations consist of a web of related problems, not connected by a common element, but resembling each other.
Solove's taxonomy of privacy problems includes four categories: information collection, information processing, information dissemination, and invasion. Harms include chilling effects, power imbalances, breaches of confidentiality, and exclusion from decision-making processes. Many privacy issues cause structural problems rather than individual injuries.
The "nothing to hide" argument focuses too narrowly on disclosure of secrets. It fails to account for contextual integrity, social value in keeping promises of confidentiality, dangers of aggregation, problems of exclusion, and difficulties in rebutting predictive prophesies about one's behavior. The debate should center on oversight and accountability procedures, not whether certain government actions should be allowed. In short, by conceptualizing privacy more pluralistically, the deficiencies of the "nothing to hide" argument become apparent.
Ever since Row v Wade was overturned, the method I've taken in arguments is to point out the now blatantly existing cases of misuse of private data to prosecute people. Many people know about the news now about how people have been arrested and convicted because of phone data that should have been private.
I haven't had this argument very often though, so so far there aren't indications as to its effectiveness. We'll have to see how it turns out.
EFF did a talk on this at Def Con, and yea the amount of digital tracking in your life can be brought to bear by the power of the state is pretty terrifying.
Your car, your phones, other people's phones. It's all documenting your life and has few rules in the US.
But I'm sure you know, if the gov't charged appropriately, you wouldn't get money back, and you'd pay less of your paychecks. They make money on any overpayment, in interest.
It's quite disappointing how governments treat their citizens like livestock instead of citizens.
Not OP, but one thing I do is having a fake name on my mailbox and doorbell. I figured my neighbours don't need to know, and parcel services don't care. I don't legally live on that address, so that helps.
I also try to keep my browser's headers more generic, especially the Accept-Language header (not applicable or particulary helpful for US residents, though). The rest (VPN, [and therefore] no Google and no social networks) I wouldn't consider an obfuscation.
To my fake name (from family and friends), anything official goes to the mailbox at my real address to which I have access to. But that rarely happens thanks to e-government. Because of presumed delivery, there's no benefit in receiving that kind of mail on paper, so I opted-in.
For e-mail, I use a domain with a catch-all mailbox. I rot13 the service name or whatever in the local-part to identify where the e-mail got leaked/sold from, which I feel like happens more often than not when buying anything from small e-shops.
Posted this three years 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.
A murderer would like to hide their location history from civil justice authorities. We often argue the cons but not the pros of being able to trace history.
A lot of ongoing evidence is based on timestamped written communication. Including for the 1/6 indictment, here you could argue what constitutes as "right" or "wrong".
What’s more important? Catching every murderer, or protecting the vulnerable from abuses of power?
Murder is reprehensible, and I agree that all efforts to catch murderers should be expended. But not at the cost of allowing those in power to abuse their power for personal gain, and retain their power, at the expense of others.
Abuses of power are far more common, and in aggregate far more harmful to society, than murder is. Obviously murder is incredibly harmful to those murdered, but if we’re gonna use that to justify privacy invading powers, then why stop there? Cars kills far more people that murderers, a person killed by a car or human is still just as dead. So why not ban all cars?
A murderer can leave his phone at home. Meanwhile some data broker will sell some random person's, who just happened to be nearby, location history to the cops.
> We often argue the cons but not the pros of being able to trace history.
Do we? Ad tech and social media have successfully convinced everyone to give up all notion of privacy if they are anywhere near a computing device with internet
The simplest retort I've heard to "I have nothing to hide" is "then send me a nude photo of yourself." Theres nothing wrong with nude bodies, but it is definitely private. I.e. privacy has nothing to do with hiding wrong/illegal things.
(obligatory disclaimer: a little inaccuracy saves a lot of explanation, but I think this gets the gist across)
My version is "I have nothing to hide, but I still lock the door when going to the toilet". While I get the point of your retort, I find it can make people defensive and often derails the conversation because it can be interpreted as a gotcha. But that kind of reaction is proof enough that people value privacy. It's just that they don't necessarily think of privacy in their home as the same thing as digital privacy.
I'm happy people are more aware about privacy issues and talk about it, everyone and everthing has been mindlessly collecting data for too long, but it looks like things are finally moving in a slightly better direction. At least one can hope :)
The article addresses that exact retort, and others in the same style. Here is what it says.
> Such responses only attack the nothing to hide argument in its most extreme form, which is not particularly strong.
The article is way more nuanced, it makes a point in attacking the real argument and not the strawman. Framing the debate into a privacy/security tradeoff.
And btw, my naked body ranks pretty low in the list of things I want to hide. I just don't walk around naked in public because most people wouldn't want me to, it may even be illegal. It is interesting however how a government that says you should have nothing to hide when it comes to surveillance also says that naked bodies must stay hidden.
The easiest response to this is that I can be OK with a limited audience seeing private information about me in service of higher goals without assenting to unnecessary widespread distribution of the same material.
For example, my doctor can look at my genitals any time he needs to, even if I don't want you to see them.
Tbh most people who use Chrome already send it to Google. The ISP can only see the domain name. Google can see the full url. But it's so convenient to sync browsing history between multiple devices, apparently.
Remove privacy (from state and society) and you will live in constant fear of being shunned, ostracized, persecuted. The result is less individuality, less creativity, less exploration.
Here's the first listed criticism of the saying on its Wikipedia page [1], by none other than Edward Snowden:
> Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
This one has confused me. A lot of the spirit of it I get behind; I am similarly indignant at the nothing to hide argument, I am similarly appreciative of the value of free speech, and I appreciate the idea that you might hope that you have "something to say", in the sense of having values, or ways in which you are engaged in the world that are important and meaningful to you. And I even understand and support the idea that you are letting a beautiful right go unused if you have "nothing to say."
But, with all of those elements in place, I don't see how they serve to counter the "nothing to hide" argument. As other commenters here have pointed out, and as the paper has pointed out, it's (1) nothing to hide, from whom, and (2) just because you believe your actions are innocent, doesn't mean your information won't be used against you to target you.
But that's very different than the point that is apparently being made about free speech. It may be a bummer to live a life where you have nothing to say, but the failure implied by that is of a different kind.
It may just be that I'm missing an obvious point, but, as far as I can tell, if you have "nothing to say", the problem is that you've resigned yourself to a life that doesn't assert any values or meaning. Meanwhile, the nothing to hide problem relates to not anticipating how bad actors will use your information against you.
It would be a 1:1 analogy if the point being made was, well, you have no information? If you have nothing to hide because you have no significant life attributes or life events, I can see a way that is a criticism of an unfulfilled life, and something that makes the comparison to free speech make sense. But... it's kind of lateral to the concerns about privacy that I take to be the most essential to maintaining it as a right. But again, I may just be missing something obvious.
To elaborate: "nothing to hide" ignores the benefits to society that others, who do have something to hide, bring. Whistleblowers, various lawyers, activists, investigative journalists, labor organizers, etc.
Even if you have nothing to hide, you'll benefit immensely when, e.g., people with something to hide reveal your leaders are trying to goad you into a war under false pretenses.
To say nothing of how much the perspective changes if you live in a place like Russia or China. Historically, times and places where a good, honest person could bare their life to the government were few. How sure are you this period of relative beneficence of our governments towards its citizens will last, that you dare throw away yours and your children's freedom on the bet your future masters won't mean you harm?
That Snowden quote is a good piece of rhetoric and it's the first thing I think of when I hear the "nothing to hide" argument.
I'm not sure if it's actually true, though. It's possible that privacy and free speech are different enough that the logical parallel and inference made in the quote doesn't actually hold.
I think in a certain sense they are closely linked, because one of the very important things I keep private is... well, my opinions. I'm selective about who I say things to, and when, and if all my private conversations were to be made public, I would leave a great many things unsaid.
I'd like to save this quote. However Hackernews provides not much functionality in-platform to do so.
Although I will contend the quote needs to be amended, since this doesn't apply to agents whose actions and intentions are questionable, and I would prefer they are not able to hide them.
My personal recipe is: add “potential criminal” to any human entity mentioned in a formula. Thus, “I have nothing to hide from the FBI” should be more correctly formulated as “I have nothing to hide from potential criminals working in the FBI”.
How many people actually believe the "nothing to hide" argument though? I don't doubt some do, but I'm pretty sure most of the pushback against privacy laws etc. comes from corporations who stand to benefit from collecting and selling private information about their customers.
Though I will say some of the technical challenges thrown up by some privacy laws are considerable, and trying to comply to them (including being audited etc.) doesn't often feel like the best use of resources.
It does a good job defining what is the "nothing to hide" argument in a way that avoids the usual strawmen. The conclusion is also more nuanced and in my opinion way more interesting than what is commonly seen in HN comments.
I've got nothing to hide.... today. The problem is tomorrow. What's legal today may not be tomorrow. We usually consider "hiding" things to be stuff only criminals do. Society usually makes the right choice on who is a criminal. But society gets it wrong sometimes. Many girls across this nation are hiding their menstrual cycles from school authorities now.
I've got everything to hide because it's none of your damn business. What gives you the right to know what I'm hiding? Nothing. And we're just hurting entire generations from developing thoughts and ideals that may benefit society, because our private space gets smaller every year.
Also what will get you imprisoned is only approximately what is illegal and vice versa. You can probably dragnet a good chunk if the population and get a jury to convict them if a crime based on circumstantial evidence. Kind of like p-hacking for justice.
Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[81] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.
Some weeks back, I started to watch a movie about McCarthyism and didn't make it very far in. It's not really a history we talk that much about, perhaps because it's too disturbing.
Americans like to think that sort of thing happens elsewhere, in "bad" places like Russia, not here. But it did happen here and not that long ago and it could happen again -- here or anywhere.
Milgram's famous experiments were intended to show that what happened in Nazi Germany was due to some weird character quirk or defect of Germans and couldn't happen elsewhere. His experiment proved the opposite. It proved that a high percentage of people will just do as they are told, up to and including potentially killing someone for no real reason.
Milgram suspected before the experiment that the obedience exhibited by Nazis reflected a distinct German character, and planned to use the American participants as a control group before using German participants, expected to behave closer to the Nazis. However, the unexpected results stopped him from conducting the same experiment on German participants.
In order to take an ethical stand at some risk to themselves, people generally need to both feel very clear what is right and wrong in a particular situation and have compelling reason to stick their neck out.
People who foment evil generally do all they can to instill doubt of various sorts and deny people full disclosure, which tends to be shockingly easy. Even if the information is available, it can take a great deal of time and effort for a person to adequately educate themselves about a particular thing and this can take too long to act in a decisive and timely fashion to avert an ugly slippery slope.
The HUAC wasn’t McCarthy, of course; they are just sort of bound up in the same Red Scare history. It is routine for people outside the USA to conflate these things because of how they are presented in dramatisations; as a Brit I didn’t realise until recently.
McCarthy might have been a pivotal figure in McCarthyism (obviously ;-) but he had nothing directly to do with the HUAC because he was a senator.
He sat on what is now the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It was the Senate Committee on Government Operations then, which had an enormously broad remit and gave him his ability to harass and persecute anyone who worked for the US federal government. He was also more able to resist pressure because of it.
It's so tiresome having to argue with the exact same "retorts" over and over again. It's like they do it on purpose to wear down people's willingness to resist. It's such a fundamentally thoughtless statement. In every single case, there's a 100% chance the person does have quite a lot of things that they do actively hide, they just haven't thought it through.
If you ever hear someone say "I am non-political" they are a broken shell of a human. Everyone gets political when their state starts making demands of them.
I saw that on youtube once I saw something that is this idea flipped on its head. It was two folks, one of them was trying to talk to the other about politics, the other just shoots him down straight away.
Said something like "I was sent to Vietnam war when I was just 16, nobody should ever had to go through that. All because of politicians. Since then I don't want anything to do with politics!". They became apolitical because politics directly broke them.
In that situation, I get it. They had been through hell, as far as they are concerned they just want to be left in peace. But as you said, when the state starts forcing their ways on others, that situation of none committal generally goes out the window lest you be trampled.
The problem with 'I have nothing to hide' is that it creates a system where everybody has to abide. Everybody needs to be transparent. Everybody's data are exposed to a third party via network effect. It is not essential that Google, or government has my data. It has my friend's data, my techears, my psychologist, my president, my boss data, my wifes data. The third party might use it correctly, but then they can sell it to somebody, to a greedy corporation, to other branches of government. I see a very big potential for abuse.
I have been watching polite first amendment auditors on YouTube such as Honor Your Oath and Long Island Audit and Too Apree. They will engage in constitutionally protected activity such as video recording or panhandling* in public, or in Too Apree's case, just acting like a goof.
Quite eye-opening. All too often a police officer will attempt to run them off at the behest of a government bureaucrat. Overall, these videos reveal that the people who form our government tend to streamline the operation of government for their own convenience and comfort at the expense of the rights and convenience of ordinary citizens.
Even the people who have sworn an oath to uphold the rights enshrined in the Constitution all too often do not really understand what those rights are. Or don't care. Or think their job is about something else - keeping citizens in line or something.
One must always exercise one's rights or lose them. "I have nothing to hide" is hiding. As The Civil Rights Lawyer says: Freedom is scary. Deal with it.
For a piece that goes deep into the nuances of terminology I feel it is missing substantial broader context relevant for the digital privacy debate: Digital privacy is not a peculiarly US need, nor is it confined to the citizen-state information flows.
Social organization in modern times (as seen across the planet) has created three "attractors" through which human agency primarily expresses itself: the individual/household, the (large) commercial entity and the state in its various forms. Of-course only the first type is "real", corporations and governments are legal abstractions representing the interests of various subsets of individuals. Further, the state, despite being a virtual construct, usually has ultimate power to enforce the will of whichever subset it represents.
The dramatic challenge of digital privacy is that it applies to every possible pair (e.g. person-to-person, state-to-corporate, corporate-to-corporate, state-to-state etc.) and in all possible governance circumstances (e.g. failed state, captured (oligarchic) state, warring states etc.) not just conditioning on benign scenarios.
Discussing digital privacy and rational, human-centric designs of digital society cannot ignore these interconnected elements. E.g. corporate surveillance and state surveillance are obviously deeply linked. Social technologies (of which digital information technology is part of) should aim to remove the likelihood and severity of human-inflicted disasters. 16 years after this piece and 7 years after Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism we are nowhere close to a more serious discussion (let alone action) about the kind of digital societies we are drifting into and what kind of risks are brewing.
The control of digital information flow concerning individuals and groups of individuals is at the very center of societal organization. The challenge is not just generational, its epochal. And it is getting worse, with every piece of code that interjects itself in these information flows.
Our era is crying out for exceptional intellectual and moral leadership that will construct the canvas on which a good digital society can thrive. Unfortunately, for now at least, not many are listening.
Almost all the people overlook how any piece of precise data about them (even the fact they have bought a specific product at a specific shop on a specific day) can be used to easily manipulate them or their family into anything and that any data stored will eventually leak and become available to malevolent actors no matter how benevolent and competent the original data operator was. You can be a perfectly ordinary, lawful and likable person yet get your life ruined at any moment thanks to the tons of data collected about you.
Society with privacy is different from and preferable to society without privacy. For one example, a lack of privacy enables the identity based political fragmentation that afflicts us. For another example, in developing relationships of any kind, people choose aspects of themselves to reveal to other parties. When negotiating a price, information about the counter party is an advantage.
Anti-"I've got nothing to hide" is a trap for people who didn't think deeply enough about it. Calling "I've got nothing to hide" a "misunderstanding" is itself a misunderstanding. This appeals to people who want to mansplain privacy to the average person, however, these people don't understand the average person.
"I've got nothing to hide" taken literally, is, of course, wrong. Everyone has something to hide. Maybe you made a right turn when there was a "no turn on red" sign. If your car was recording every action you ever took and the car company decided to turn all of that data over to the government, congratulations on your fine! However, we shouldn't take things literally. We aren't, as a society, unable to understand subtext, are we?
And the context of "I have nothing to hide" is: "I have nothing to hide from the system as it currently is and I am taking a calculated risk that the system is not going to change radically any time soon"
The layperson is bad at expressing this deeper concept that they intuit, and why should they be good at it? People are busy living their lives, not everyone wants to become an expert on their own motivations because someone on the internet decided to shove a "You do have something to hide, actually" article in their face.
One of the biggest problem I see with surveillance is not the breach of privacy, but incompetence.
See, I live in Pakistan, where we have mandatory ID cards that are required for anything, and the data of which has been leaked, and where you literally don't have a right to privacy, or any other rights, for that matter.
So I have no delusion that I have any privacy whatsoever from the government, and frankly I damn care because, after all, it's not like I've done or said anything wrong, I self-censor myself quite strictly.
What I fear are mistakes in data collection.
Sometime ago, I went to get a copy of my "family tree" (a legal document) upon the passing of my late father, and discovered that by mistake some other people's data had been linked to the same family tree as ours (some typo in the family tree ID field, the rest of the data was clearly distinct).
Imagine the consequence had I not asked them to correct this, from inheritance issues, to being picked up by the secret police because some "supposed" family member had done something and they check the database, discover I am "linked" and question me about my none-existent sibling.
The fact that I have nothing to hide would be little solace as the police perform rubber-hose decryption on me.
Worse yet, with the data breaches, my (outdated) data being in the darknet means loan sharks using it can come harass me for any debts my supposed relative took.
There are so many reasons why data security/privacy matters, none of which have to do with hiding anything.
I still fear any new additions or deletions in the database since then, but I can't keep going to the HQ and asking to verify my data every day.
In this new world we need accept transparency and I'll even say total transparency. Everything going to be transparent and you have to get used to it, you'll have to behave accordingly. It becomes, how should I put it, integrated into your personality, but if you have nothing to hide... you shouldn't be afraid.
There are good lists of breaches but few describing what happened to the people afterwards. Credit card theft resulting in a loss being the most obvious one.
Such concrete (real) examples would help me to argue with people who say: all this non-sense about data privacy. What would anyone want to do with your data anyways?
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