I like this argument.

My normal response to "I have nothing to hide" is: "Cool, can I take a look at your browser search/reddit history?".

“My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”

— Bruce Schneier, The Eternal Value of Privacy, https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/

I completely agree with that. However, it's not always possible to go down the rabbit hole of inherent human rights during a casual lunchroom conversation while you're making a coffee.

These "quips" have their place. Hopefully, they make people think and at least consider the importance of privacy.

That argument doesn't work because some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable to anyone they know or work for. (This is impossible when you know or work for diverse groups, but inside of a monoculture it's possible.)

Somebody thinking they are "safe", inside a monoculture, could easily get caught out saying or doing something that turns out (now, or in a few years) to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc., (or overly politically correct, for that matter), even as a joke, slip of the tongue, or ignorance.

Which we have witnessed with celebrities having 10 year old tweets dug up when twitter was just a stupid little website.

The safest bet is to say as little as possible when it comes to the internet.

Yet there are millions of kids who cannot legally consent uploading to Tiktok et al. I'm so glad this didn't exist when I was 9 years old. I'm not sure how 2020 9 year olds re going to feel about it in 20 years time.

Ask your political conformist, "So I'll give you $20 for a copy of your tax return, your birth certificate, financial acct numbers, and passwords. There's a guy I know who said he'd pay me if I could get them from you, and I'm willing to split it with you."

Some people are also so good at compartmentalizing that they believe this, but ask the right question and they realize they do in fact have (deeply shameful, at least to them) things to hide. Of course, you have to know the dirty secret.

Case in point: I had an ex whose grandparents lived in a mansion on a ranch in the Ozarks, and were very well off (some kind of corporate lawyers). Their public image in the community was one of great wealth and benevolence; due to some bad financial moves, they'd lost everything a few years back and their kids, grandkids, and great grandkids had scrambled to buy the house out from them, a loving gesture, so they could maintain their image. I learned of this secret (which itself isn't really shameful, people make mistakes, even big ones!) after a year or so.

They were both of the "we have nothing to hide," but one day I asked whether they'd like their neighbors to know about their penury; they told me to shut up and mind my own business.

Nothing to hide? Everyone's got something to hide, but for the most part we don't know it, because they're hiding it!!

I don't buy it. We all do things that although not wrong we still wouldn't like to share with anyone. i.e. No person wants to be seen picking their nose, although everybody does it.

If someone believes they wouldn't mind being seen picking their nose, it doesn't matter whether they are correct in that assessment. You won't convince them using such an argument because they won't agree with your premise even though you're right.

I doubt most of them will agree to me seeing what they do inside bathroom.

> some people are so conformist that every detail about their personal lives would be considered 100% unobjectionable

In this time and age, I find that highly doubtful.

It's not a question of whether it's true, it's a question of whether they think it's true.

Heh, never looked at this from that angle. At least some more people might have gotten an idea for why privacy is indeed important.

Somebody prove it by posting their email password. If we require encryption backdoors, the odds of it all ending up on Pastebin at some point is about the same.

hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars

  ********* see!

--------

http://bash.org/?244321

old joke, but still hilarious

With the poor security practices of the non-technical majority, it doesn't take an encryption backdoor for their password to end up on PasteBin. It already is on PasteBin.

Whatever you tell to the infallible us government you are also telling to china.... and ISIS

Then just change the question to "Cool, can I take a look at your bank account details?"

Which doesn't work either: "Well the government already knows my bank details"

What I think is that many of us in my country, where government is quite powerful (and still democratic) have reached a level of comfort such that the fact of having some state agency looking at some of my detail is totally acceptable since it doesn't change our comfort.

Now, tell those same people they'll have to pay a tax based on the destination they choose for holidays, and you'll get them in the streets (I'm exagerating a bit, but you get the picture)...

"It's not about the government having your bank account details. Do you want scammers to have your bank account details? Identity thieves? If encryption is outlawed, you won't be able to keep it from them."

Ok, then feel free to post yours here.

"Yes, but only if I can look at yours. I have nothing to hide, but I don't want to be the only one who's isolated and exposed to the public".

"I have nothing to hide" implies that everyone should be open to investigation.

Everyone knows what most people do in the bathroom at work, yet they still close the stall door.

I bet you don't know that I mostly read HN in the bathroom :D

Coworkers probably have noticed how long you stay!

Either that or Chrohn's disease.

But what if it's a glass door.

It's all about transparency after all.

I use to point out that I'm not even hiding it from the local police, today. Police here are OK.

I'm hiding it from:

- a future where the nazis or another totalitarian party wins the election

- future corrupt police personnel

- other countries intelligence (not everything I say might be compatible with doing work in North Korea/China/Israel/Saudi Arabia/Turkey (edit: added Turkey, I don't plan to go there in my holiday anyway)

- Leaks from police IT systems

And then I point to Turkey who went from approaching membership in EU to human rights hostile dictatorship in two years.

I usually say something similar, "Oh? Let me show your browser history and all your text messages to your significant other, your co-workers, and your boss."

I've used that one before. And for those who truly do believe they have nothing to hide, you can point to the ~1% of wrongfully convicted inmates in the US who probably thought they didn't have anything to hide either.

They just say “sure” and pretend they don’t care.

Or they actually don’t, because they do nothing of consequence on a computer.

I like this. I'll offer a third approach, but yours might be better: remind the person that there are plenty of moments in normal life in which no-one is doing anything wrong, but for which privacy remains paramount. This doesn't take much imagination.

It doesn't speak to Internet surveillance directly, but it's enough to show that there's more to privacy than the desire to conceal wrongdoing.

Edit Also, there's a great 2007 paper on this kind of thing, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Mirror: https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

No offense to apeace but this is the far better argument. A conversation in a bar is public already; you have no idea if the person sitting across the room might have a microphone trained on you and recording the conversation, because you are speaking in a group within a larger group with no protections. There is no expectation of privacy so there is no argument for privacy in that analogy.

It's far better to ask why we should have encryption (for our safety, our security, and yes, our personal privacy) rather than whether we should have it. The government, with this bill, is debating whether we should have it, when it's obvious to the people that we definitely should. Turn that around on the senators proposing it; ask them if they want to build in back doors into our digital lives, can we as their employers and electors do the same thing to them?

Wouldn't the counterargument be "but only the government would have access, and we can trust the government"?

Even if you grant "only the government has access," I think you still shouldn't be complacent, because what the government considers acceptable can change, and may not agree with what you think is acceptable.

E.g., maybe a govt comes into power that is strongly anti-gay, and punishes you for being pro-gay rights.

Or the opposite.

In general the idea that the government will always be reasonable and should have unlimited surveillance powers is unsound and unappealing.

Or the current situation in Hong Kong with China, for example.

The counter-counter-argument is the whole history of both individual (against policy) and official (by policy) abuse of surveillance in the history of government. Every expansion of monitoring must weigh the specific expected benefits against the very real cost of expanding both of those abuse surfaces.

Just check out the Stasi in Germany. Power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Sure. But Kevin, who works in a government department, is someone.

No, because such a scheme is not really possible. It’s only a matter of time before the governments secret key gets leaked.

I work for the government.

Mind if I riffle through your contacts? Is it ok to DM any cute people I find?

Why do cute people need special protection?

Only if you were willing to accept the "we can trust the government" part.

Which government?

The best response is simpler than that, that even encryption laymen can understand:

"If I have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to look."

That argument doesn't really work. You supposedly know whether you have "nothing to hide" (and don't dare to admit it if you do have something to hide), they need to look to check this.

The point is that "nothing to hide" should be the default assumption. Breaking enctyption turns this around and makes people guilty by default.

We all know what happens in the bathroom, yet we still close the door. Privacy is a choice that belongs to me.