I'm not doubting some people have secrets that they genuinely need to keep, some people are honest-to-goodness terrorists, for example.

Just the narrative that suggests all people should be worried about secrecy; I'll warrant most people's secrets wouldn't cause enough of a stir to dissolve a sugar lump in a hot cup of tea.

Mind posting a picture of yourself, from the front, fully nude? And your home address, or at least zip code, too. Shouldn't take too long to do. Not picky about quality, either- a phone camera will be more than fine. But make sure your face is in the shot, of course.

If you don't want to post it publically, let me know and I'll create a temporary email to send it to. I'll be sure to delete it after verifying it.

...

Do you feel disgust in reaction to that request? I suspect most people would.

But why? It's not like it's anything sensitive, like a password. I mean...if you don't send the picture, what are you trying to hide? Are you a terrorist? I'm not even a government agent- I don't have the power to throw you in jail.

But, turns out, even when you don't have anything to hide, there's still some things you don't want to share. That's just human.

I knew someone would take that line - I've been naked in public, but that's different to actively passing information to someone with an axe to grind.

Not wanting to send you a picture is pretty orthogonal to worrying about the off chance that some gov official will at some point see me naked.

What address do you want me to send to?

You're warranting that, but since you don't know people's secrets, how can you possibly make that determination? With some creativity I can think of many wonderful ways to find out and construct monsters of relatively minor things - the conversations people are willing to have in private are massively different from what they'll go on record saying. How can you not have encountered this difference? Can you really not imagine how even the most innocent of statements or criticisms can be construed by a paranoid power in the worst possible light?

>since you don't know people's secrets, how can you possibly make that determination? //

It's a conversation. You can tell me everyone you know has secretly murdered at least one person and progress things somewhat (I'm being flippant, of course).

Saying things in public is not "being on record" though. Someone has to make the effort to look up about you, and we all wore a stupid costume, got drunk and made a pass at someone, dropped some litter, swore, or whatever ... in a Western Democracy are you going to shame me for normal behaviours, I think you'll struggle.

>Can you really not imagine how even the most innocent of statements or criticisms can be construed by a paranoid power in the worst possible light? //

Yes, what's the motivation? Fascist takeover? We're all in the same boat aren't we: OMG my neighbor looked at porn, let's burn him at the stake??

Sorry, I'm not interested in you making a determination that the private lives and conversations of others are similar to yours, nor do I accept any premise that simply because you've judged people to 'not be terrorists' and the risk of governmental abuse to be low, that there is no real risk of agencies abusing such data. Your justifications are personal, and frankly, should have no bearing on other people's lives. If you can't imagine real cases of private conversation (or DNS lookups, or whatever) being used to profile and target particular groups for fairly undemocratic reasons, then that's a failure of your imagination. We are not all in the same boat, especially if by 'boat' you mean we all socialise with the same people, have the same political beliefs and actions, or even share our sexual orientation.

What do you consider secrets people genuinely need to keep? And who determines what is considered genuinely need to keep? Also telling you jump directly from genuinely need to keep straight to being terrorists.

Secrets don’t just need to be incriminating, they can also just be embarrassing. People don’t want the world to know they are secretly seeing a lover, or watch a specific type of porn or spend half their time at work browsing HN. Some of those will have real life ramifications.