You, someone's friends, and someone's mom are not law enforcement investigating a crime.

There's a big difference between these scenarios.

Law enforcement are civilians like you or me. It was a big mistake to grant them special rights. If they can arrest people then it should be legal for you and me to arrest a LEO. Why should any person have special rights in a Democracy?

I think the "nothing to hide" argument is made for a different reason.

People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them. The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal), but your church knowing your search history would absolutely be a big deal.

> People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them.

A very famous quote: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Many people - particularly white people, but let's not ignore that a bunch of Black and Latino folks are/have been Trump supporters - believe that they are part of the in-group. And inevitably, they find out that the government doesn't care, as evidenced by ICE and their infamous quota of 3000 arrests a day... which has hit a ton of these people, memefied as "leopards ate my face".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/trump-ice-ar...

> The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal)

Until someone at or above the TSA decides they don't like you. And then they use your search history to blackmail you. Because lots of people search for things that wouldn't be comfortable being public. Or search for things that could easily be taken out of context. Especially when that out of context makes it seem like they might be planning something illegal

Heck, there's lots of times where people mention a term / name for something on the internet; and, even though that thing is benign, the _name/term_ for it is not. It's common for people to note that they're not going to search for that term to learn more about it, because it will look bad or the results will include things they don't want to see.

When someone said "I got nothing to hide" I always took it to mean "I will tell the nazis when they come which house to look in".

It's good to know in advance who they are.

> Some retorts for people swayed by that argument

Do any of these actually prompt someone to reconsider their position? They strike me as more of argument through being annoying than a good-faith attempt to connect with the other side.

I usually just quote Snowden instead:

    “Ultimately, 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.”

Not as clever as it may sound. It is perfectly possible that someone has nothing to hide in a good way, whereas someone without anything to say for himself cannot be easily imagined as a good faith social individual. So in a way this is comparing apples to bad apples and claiming they are perfectly equal.

> whereas someone without anything to say for himself cannot be easily imagined as a good faith social individual

Huh? You can’t imagine boring people as a “good faith social individual”?

If you have nothing so say for yourself that is more than beeing boring, it is beeing indifferent which is just one step away from amoral.

Or acutely stressed. Some people clam up as a stress response.

I feel "people should not have have consequences for what they say", and "people should be able to avoid consequences for what they have done", are separate concepts. One does not require believing in the other. For example I believe the former, but for the latter I believe everyone should be punished when they break the law.

> I feel "people should not have have consequences for what they say", and "people should be able to avoid consequences for what they have done", are separate concepts.

'Saying' is an example of 'doing', and the moderation to speech happens after the fact, including (yes) in USA. Consider the case of a person yelling fire or 'he's got a gun!' when there is none, or a death threat.

People should have consequences for what they say, but not from the government. You should never be prosecuted for what you say, no matter how vile. But other people are free to exercise their rights in response, including freedom of association.

That was a typo in my post. Fixed.

So if public figures with a sizeable following start calling for you and your family to be chased down and gutted like animals, should they legally be allowed to do that? Do you actually believe that?

Generally speaking, I think the point of statements like this is to shoot down the trite and thought-free cliche "if you have nothing to hide". And the point is rarely to convince the person you're speaking to, it's usually to get people who might otherwise be swayed by hearing the trite and thought-free cliche to think for a moment.

If you're talking directly to one person and trying to convince them, without an audience, there are likely different tactics that might work, but even then, some of the same approach might help, just couched more politely. "You don't actually mean that; do you want a camera in your bedroom with a direct feed to the police? What do you actually mean, here? What are you trying to solve?"

Option A: "Yes!", which tells you you're probably talking to someone who cares more about not admitting they're wrong than thinking about what they're saying.

Option B: "Well, no, but...", and now you're having a discussion.

Generally speaking, people who say things like "if you have nothing to hide" either (charitably) haven't thought about it very much and are vaguely wanting to be "strict on crime" without thought for the consequences because they can't imagine it affecting them, or (uncharitably) have attitudes about what they consider "shameful" and they really mean "you shouldn't do things that I think you should feel shame about".

Quite. I think a lot of Americans are acculturated (partly via movies and TV) to constant one-upmanship and trying to end disagreements with zingers. Look how many political videos on YouTube are titled 'Pundit you like DESTROYS person you disapprove of!' You see the same patterns in Presidential 'debates' and Congressional hearings. It's all very dramatic but lacking in real substance.

Which are quippy and dismissed because they fundamentally misunderstand privacy. There is such a concept as "privacy in a crowd" - you expect, and experience it, every day. You generally expect to be able to have a conversation in say, a coffee-shop, and not have it intruded upon and commented upon by other people in the shop. Snippets of it may be overheard, but they will be largely ignored even if we're all completely aware of snippets of other conversations we have heard, and bits and pieces have probably been recorded on peoples phones or vlogs or whatever.

That's privacy in a crowd and even if they couldn't describe it, people do recognize it.

What you are proposing in every single one of these, is violating that in an overt and disruptive way - i.e.

> "Let's send your mom all your text messages."

Do I have anything in particular to hide in my text messages, of truly disastrous proportions? No. But would it feel intrusive for a known person who I have to interact with to get to scrutinize and comment on all those interactions? Yes. In much the same way that if someone on the table over starts commenting on my conversation in a coffee-shop, I'd suddenly not much want to have one there.

Which is very, very different from any notion of some amorphous entity somewhere having my data, or even it being looked at by a specific person I don't know, won't interact with, and will never be aware personally exists. Far less so if the only viewers are algorithms aggregating statistics.

I'm pro-privacy and I still think these retorts just make it sound like you've put zero effort into understanding what the "nothing to hide" people are trying to articulate.

E.g. "Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"

Very few people are arguing that nudity or bathroom use shouldn't be private, and they are not going to understand what this has to do with their argument that the NSA should be allowed to see Google searches to fight terrorism or whatever.

Privacy arguments are about who should have access to what information. For example, I'm fine with Google seeing my Google searches, but not the government monitoring them.

"I've got nothing to hide." is a rather extreme statement. The people who say it don't mean it literally. But saying something they don't mean aren't really helping their points across. I think OP’s retorts are simply to show how absurd the “I’ve got nothing to hide” claim is, regardless of how effective the retorts are.

I'm not out to defend "I've got nothing to hide", but those who say it are usually saying it about a specific policy (e.g. the NSA monitoring searches). It's usually clear what the context is and that's what you have to argue against to actually engage and convince someone. They probably do mean quite literally that they have nothing to hide from the government. It's not an extreme statement in context.

But on the internet we often do this thing where we take the weakest version or a distorted version of an opposing side's argument and ridicule that. It's not quite strawmanning because we never specified who we're arguing against, and surely we can imagine someone, somewhere on the internet has the ridiculous viewpoint. But it's not a common viewpoint (that, for example, we shouldn't have privacy in the bathroom). Doing this only gets us pats on the back from those who already agree with us and deludes us about our opponent's position.