Submitted 1 year ago by HandOfDoom@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
I know data privacy is important and I know that big corporations like Meta became powerful enough to even manipulate elections using our data.
But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they “have nothing to hide”, and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.
So, why should people worry about data privacy even if they have “nothing to hide”?
Edward Snowden remarked:
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.
There is a wikipedia article regarding this argument
This is a nice quote, however it misses the goal of the original post.
For example, I fall into the group of people that don’t care about their digital privacy, but I fully support anyone who decides to go invisible on the internet.
Saying “I don’t need privacy because I’ve got nothing to hide” is like saying “I don’t need free speech because I’ve got nothing to say”.
I feel like most replies here are missing the point.
The entire premise of the statement is that privacy is about defending your dirty secrets. When people say “nothing to hide” they’re really saying “I’m not going to post about anything I want to hide”, but that still misses the point.
For me it’s the subtle principles of advertising. I don’t want to be advertised to, at all. I certainly don’t want some blog to know what adverts I’m likely to engage with, because that is simply none of their business.
That’s it. If that doesn’t bother some people, that’s entirely fine. I’m a bit weird, and the whole idea of being tracked to figure out what things I might want to buy makes me very grumpy.
I am doing a paper on this. Privacy as hiding something shameful is a dated concept, like, before villages were a thing. I haven’t time to develop, but privacy was always a privilege of the rich. Back when people were in villages and technology was word of mouth, rich from the time being were in their castles. Knowing what is on peoples mind is a old form of control, while having the right of privacy is freedom. I am a grad student and I have to develop more on the subject, but it’s not about hiding your porn watchlist, lol. It’s about having control of your own decisions. If you understand how someone thinks, changing and satisfying (or pretending to) is actually pretty easy.
If anyone like Futurama, watch the “Killer App” episode
It’s wrong to be dismissive. Hiding something shameful is now, and will likely always be, a critical element of privacy. I agree that it’s not the whole story (or perhaps even the most important part) but it’s certainly the part that people many people spend the most time thinking about.
I hate ads, with a burning passion, but when I get stuck with one that’s wildly irrelevant to my interests, I know that I’m doing something right. Feels good to be a blank spot on the algorithm.
sometimes i get ads for like maternity stuff or jewelry or cars
i’m a guy with a vasectomy and not enough money for a car
it’s very funny
You’re not weird ! Quite the contrary, we are on the right path to fight those greedy corporation !! To bad we’re the minority ://!
Ask them how much they make or their medical record.
Tell them you will pay google several cents for that info.
“But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they “have nothing to hide”, and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.”
Sounds like they have passwords and banking apps to hide, You should demand their bank account and credit card details to verify that they have made no illicit actions.
If they point out that they have no reason to trust you with that information, that’s when you point out that police, government, or corporate groups are made out of people just like yourself. They might have some codes of conduct, or a vetting process, but it just takes one person malicious or careless enough for you to be severely impacted.
Yeah cause corporations are going to steal money off my card. I’d have zero issues sharing that data if their water a reason… I regularrly share steam/gamepass password. You people are insane with broken logic.
What if I also don’t worry about these?
A bit more historic, but still very relevant. The FBI used surveillance in repeated attempts to discredit Martin Luther King JR. It’s chilling how they used the information they gathered to try to get rid of MLK any way they could. They were even trying to use information they gathered to convince him to commit suicide.
If you have nothing to hide, you wouldn’t mind handing me your unlocked phone so I can scroll through your texts and search history, go ahead.
Sorry, that would take too long, but I’ll send a copy so they can see how utterly boring/undocumented my life is.
And that is why it’s hard to explain. People live different lives. What’s unimportant to some may be important to many others. It’s not all the same. Privacy loss is not an immediate problem. But if and when it becomes a problem, it’s a huge damn problem for an individual.
I got nothing to hide in my asshole either, doesn’t mean I want you rifling around through there. Its creepy
“Right on, so let me rifle through your nightstand”
More like “Let me rifle through everything in your apartment, your email, browser history, passwords, social media messages, and then provide me the geolocation date for everywhere you go, along with your biometric data.”
The problem with your argument is it doesn’t even showcase just how egregious the entire privacy invasion aspect is.
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief bragged that he could prove criminal conduct on anyone, even the innocent.
Before Hitler, why wouldn’t you put down you were Jewish.
You may have nothing to hide now. But who knows how it’ll be used against you in the future. The less people know about you, the better.
This is usually the approach I take. You “have nothing to hide” now doesnt mean you won’t want to hide something considered normal or not a problem right now in the future. I’m sure many people if they could go back in time would remove pictures or comments from social media that were appropriate (or at least not a big problem at the time) that haunt them now.
“How often do you and your wife fuck?”
Yeah, that’s a pretty strong line, plus you could keep going with ever more disturbing questions.
Just ask them a bunch of indiscreet questions. Do you watch porn? What category of porn turns you on the most? Do you think it’s appropriate to have sex in a room on the ground floor without curtains? What? You own curtains? What is your salary? What’s the amount of money in your savings account? Why do you have so many loud disagreements with your partner? Don’t you like visiting your in-laws? What’s inside the drawer at the bottom, next to your bed? Have you had any embarassing and cringy moments in the last few years you’d like to share?
Of course this is only the beginning. It’s not like the corporations collect data and then don’t do anything with it. You’d also have to be okay with them deducing information about you. Try to use that information to manipulate you into giving them attention, buying the stuff they want you to buy. That system is in place to nudge you into thinking what the algorithm wants you to think. App developers are actively trying to make the apps more addicting so you spend more time with them… People just get exploited with the help of all of that data.
If people really are that tame and have no secret fantasies, no sensitive data, no shame, no personal shortcomings they’d like to forget… And they don’t care about the annual security breaches of big platforms people use willingly, but that information then gets used by people who use it to send you spam or impersonate you and trick your grandma to send her retirement to some scammer… And they like to be shoved around by big corporations like cattle, used to fuel the capitalist system… …I myself tend to leave them alone. There is nothing that can be done at this point. Those people are lost, and they don’t want freedom for themselves.
Or maybe do you always obey the speed limit in your car, and who is your insurance company? Or something among those lines…
This is a great question to use because how many of these people have given their smartphone location permissions? Google knows if they speed already.
Pull out your phone, state “You’re ok with this, right?! After all you have nothing to hide” and very overtly put it in voice recording mode.
Then start asking the questions.
I don’t think this works, because any sexual stuff they don’t think google / Mega Corp cares about. Which is true google doesn’t give a shit if you have sex without curtains, they only care if you are shopping for curtains.
And the rest of the questions only matter if you are running for office or something which again 99.9% aren’t, so they don’t give a shit.
I’m all for privacy, but the argument I have nothing to hide except bank account passwords etc is hard to argue with, when it comes to the average person, because the truth is that they don’t matter and most likely no-one cares about their specific data.
Most data is only valuable in mass, unless you’re being criminally investigated or something.
Perhaps you never heard of the psychological targeting done for political purposes through the misuse of mass data. (Cambridge Analytics)
I think we’re talking about an abstract concept here. The example with the sex questions is more of a metaphor/image to make you remember there is stuff out there, we’d like to keep private. It’s not necessarily your main concern regarding google. Those are different things but way less graphic and more difficult to explain, so i went with this example.
only matter if you are running for office or something
You’re close to the category of people i described last. You don’t care for freedom. You don’t care your attention is guided by other people. Information that is shown to you is gated by algorithms. And their power to manipulate you comes from the knowledge they have about you.
no-one cares about their specific data
Au contraire. Companies pay big money for data. The more specific, the more valuable. The biggest companies of today, like amazon, google, twitter, meta… Their business model is to collect data about you, sell advertisements, maybe even sell the data they’ve collected about you. And all of that is worth billions and billions of dollars. Why do you think they let you use TikTok or YouTube or something for free and the comany still makes millions?
I’m all for privacy, but the argument I have nothing to hide … is hard to argue with, when it comes to the average person, because the truth is that they don’t matter and most likely no-one cares about their specific data.
In that case, please post your real name, tax id (SSN in the States) and annual household income.
N.B. None of this information is private.
but the argument I have nothing to hide except bank account passwords etc is hard to argue with
It’s simple to argue against: any and all data points are either potential threat vectors, or will in aggregate paint a better picture of the individual they pertain to, for the data’s possessor to use as they wish. A default-deny policy for data creation/access makes as much sense for individuals as it does workplaces.
OK then give me all your passwords
Ask them: How much money do they have in their bank account? How often do they have sexual relations?
Data privacy? I have nothing to hide. Freedom of speech? I have nothing to say.
I’ve seen dumb answers to this, “Google is fine because I don’t care what they know, it’s not going to affect my life”
“Take your pants off and walk outside”
What counters it is the fact that you might not have anything to hide now but you might have to hide something in the future. Circumstances might change, your country might turn into an authoritarian dictatorship over time, that declares a quality or behavior of yours to be illegal. They can and will use all your data against you to prosecute you.
This is a very real possibility for pretty much every country in the world right now. Authoritarianism is on the rise
It is the roaring 20s
One very good point I heard once is this: You have nothing to hide NOW, but what if a government raises that somehow views you as a menace? What if you don’t agree.
What if something that you can’t change about yourself, say your religion, your sexual preference etc. This has happened before and is happening right now in some countries.
Yeah I bring this up. We are installing the mechanisms for which some crazy future totalitarian government can exercise absolute control over the population.
With the technology we have today, we can make 1984 a reality. In fact, Orwell would be surprised at just how effective we could be. We’re even working on the mind reading at this point.
When the child killer knocks on the door and asks where the kids are, you don’t tell him the truth.
Nothing to hide until a person has something to hide. An attitude of “I don’t have anything to hide” may catch up to a person. No one knows what the future holds. One day they might start tracking private information a person does not want tracked, for example financial or medical data. So better to put the fence up now than try to put it up during a stampede.
Personally I keep my personal data private with a reasonable amount of effort. I try to keep a small internet footprint and there’s stuff I won’t do for the sake of privacy. Going some years back the only social media I engaged in was Reddit until coming here to Lemmy. These are anonymous mediums. It blows my mind that so many people are willing to completely splay out their lives non-anonymously on social media.
Realistically there isn’t one. People dropping that argument are not interested in a dialectic.
It ultimately doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide. Some people do and have good, ethical, reason to. Universal privacy is the only way to ensure necessary privacy.
Data privacy isn’t to protect you from getting caught doing wrong things, it’s to prevent malicious actors from having the information to manipulate you. You don’t want phishers to have access to your life details that security questions ask about, even if each one is nothing to hide. You don’t want scammers to know where you went to school, who your teachers were, and what clubs you were in to build up a convincing backstory for their facade. You don’t want someone who wants to get something out of you to know who is important to you and threaten them. It’s not about having something to hide, it’s about hiding personal details from those with malicious intent
You don’t want someone who wants to get something out of you
Every corporation ever
This exactly, and the more victims the scammers can get the more it supports their endeavors.
…but you still close the door when you go to the lavatory, right? Why? It’s not like we don’t know exactly what you do there.
The argument here is that it’s no secret, but it is personal and nobody’s business. If you don’t want Zuck to watch you pee then you should also not want him reading your texts to your lover.
“Having nothing to hide” sounds like worrying about getting in trouble from data. But you can also get yourself and others into trouble being tracked or manipulated without consent.
A big problem is that data does not usually go away (even of you erase or delete it or forgot you shared it).
Any data you reveal can build up over time. The more data available on you, the easier it is to triangulate, to find you specifically.
And patterns happen over time. More data on your habits makes it easier to predict what you do, easier to manipulate you. Not just with advertisements or insurance rates, I mean outright scams. For example, my grandfather got conned out of $5k by a scammer who could impersonate my cousin based on the cousin’s facebook, linkedin, and public records.
We also have very little insight into how much data we generate. Especially online, we can’t imagine the amount of logged activity and data generated. This makes it hard to meaningfully say “I don’t have a problem with how somebody uses my data” because we can’t even grasp the scale of the data and how it can be used.
I also second another poster who mentioned you don’t have anything to hide now, but times change. You can’t go back and protect data once it’s used against you! I have firsthand experience with that in Texas, USA. I worked with a company that realized in July 2022 that they should NOT record if people were pregnant in a huge database. We didn’t want to have data on a pregnancies that may not work out for whatever reason in Texas because it could be used against people.
There’s a certain irony in the degree of privacy discussion and advocacy on the fediverse, where even your upvotes and downvotes are part of the public record.
That’s, coupled with lackluster security vetting for server software and infrastructure across multiple instances means that invariably cross correlating your likes of furry porn with the email used in the account is going to happen in the future.
A lot of people are going to end up burned thinking that “non-corporate operation” = ‘private.’
I’m curious how many people actually think that, although it’s unknowable of course.
You’re right in that a huge portion of people would certainly make that assumption.
However, i would argue that the fediverse & open source in general is more “privacy respecting” because we can have a discussion about exactly what is disclosed and why it is disclosed.
In practice, using the web without leaking information about our preferences is pretty much impossible. “Privacy” (on and off the web) is never about “no disclosure”, it’s always about what needs to be disclosed, why it needs to be disclosed, and whether I personally am comfortable disclosing in exchange for whatever service I am seeking.
I has some degree of privacy. A better way to look at it is to say: It’s less worst ! But full privacy is to shut down all your connected electric aplliances, never connect to the web, sell your house and go living of the grid.
I have nothing to hide but I don’t leave my doors unlocked for everyone to go through my home when they see fit.
‘No one’s spying on me, I’m not interesting’ is more pernicious than Nothing to Hide. Most adults can kind of sense the idiocy of the latter refrain. But ask the utterer why advertising is a trillion-dollar industry if their attitudes and behaviours aren’t interesting, or why a data broking industry even exists, and you’ll typically be asked ‘why care?’
What’s harder to work out is whether the utterance is a genuine failure to comprehend the nature of surveillance capitalism, or a grasping denial of its impact, as though they’re only 80 per cent convinced of their footprint’s worthlessness. It’s difficult to convince someone to turn down their data faucet when they barely acknowledge the faucet’s existence to start with.
My guess is that most people, like you said, fail to grasp surveillance capitalism. They have zero idea of how computers or the internet works, and think that billion dollar companies aren’t connecting data points on their browsing habits to sell them stuff, or even worse, make their findings known to other 3rd parties like insurance companies and scammers. People just literally have no clue. Most people couldn’t even be bothered to educate themselves about what Edward Snowden was talking about.
The awful story from that mother and daughter that had their private conversations send to court for abortion by Meta: techcrunch.com/…/teen-and-mom-plead-guilty-to-abo…
The thing that astounds me about this story and those like it is that people discuss such things on unencrypted messaging apps. As much as possible, I don’t discuss anything more significant than the weather on those platforms.
That’s terrible of course, but the story alone doesn’t really counter the ‘nothing to hide’ argument when they did have something to hide.
“So what’s the IP address of your toilet webcam”
Just self-host your toilet 😎
Du you lock the door to the toilet? What are you doing in there that’s so secret?
That is a clear example of that there are legitimate things that you want to keep private.
My colleague gave me that response. I asked if I could go through his off-facebook activities for fun. “Sure, got nothing to hide” About 5 seconds in he could bare it and asked me to leave him alone. Lol
ghostwolf@lemmy.fakeplastictrees.ee 1 year ago
Ask them to unlock their phone and give it to you. Chances are, you’ll quickly find out there have things they’d like to hide.