No Stupid Questions

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 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.

I have done nothing illegal and nothing wrong, yet I have everything to hide.

I don't trust what judgements our governments 10 years from now wants to put on me, my family and my children based on my current loud political acceptance of trans rights, free abortion, and my express hatred of fascism.

Turn it on them. Ask them to give up something private in front of you like their phone or wallet. Hey, if they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't worry... But they will.

Just ask them for their phone. Don't say what for.

One I came across a while ago is simple - Curtains. We all close ourselves to the outside world.

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.'

"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.

A lot of the rebuttals in this thread are non-sensical. Why would I let someone use my phone for no reason?

When people say they don’t care about privacy, they don’t really mean it. What they mean is they are willing to sacrifice some of it for the sake of convenience, safety, or something else they find valuable. That’s certainly a valid trade-off to make. If you’re trying to convince someone they should care more about privacy, that entirely depends on the person.

As the Cypherpunk Manifesto says:

Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

... An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

People can desire privacy for privacy's sake. Wanting privacy doesn't necessarily mean they're criminals who need anonymity or secrecy to cover up illegal/immoral acts; it just means they're human.

For an offline example, consider that you're a cis girl in a women's locker room. You know everyone knows you have certain body parts, and you have nothing to "hide" due to this, but you still don't want to be stared at as you peel off your swimsuit.

Some things are private but not illegal, like taking a shit. There are zero good reasons to intrude on that scene and anyone who tries is suspect. Who cares if you have something to hide? Why are we ok with letting a megacorporation give us a digital colonoscopy when we're only trying to live our lives?

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

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.

'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.

"So what's the IP address of your toilet webcam"

"I have nothing to hide"

"cool, let me have your credit card number and billing address"

Using a smartphone today is like buying a house and discovering that is full of cameras and microphones spying you. Would you accept thtat?

I may have nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I want it on public display either.

It's a basic human right, and if you're in a restrictive country like North Korea or China, data privacy means everything because individuals don't know if they're saying something wrong that could put them in danger.

A friend from college who is Chinese told me that whenever they go back to China for holidays, they have to clear out all the chat history on WeChat, a messaging app commonly used in China. This is because sometimes Chinese guards pick someone's phone and check for any content that could be seen as critical of China.

...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.

I like to say something along the lines of this "Why do you close the door when you use the restroom? You don't have anything to hide right? It's only natural what you're doing in there. It's because you want privacy and the same goes for your data online."

Some people just don’t care and will never care. Everyone makes decisions about what to worry bout. For some it’s being vegan/vegetarian, others web privacy, some others won’t concern themselves with either.

Humans have a limited capacity to care about things, and despite our best efforts not everyone is going to care.

The Jews in 1939 Germany did nothing wrong.

I just came to the realisation, that all those cold calls where no one says anything are probably just recording for recreating your voice sigh...

I usually take the angle of asking them if they act differently when they know they're being watched and to imagine a life where they're always watched.

You may have nothing to hide, but have you seen what ChatGPT or Midjourney can do? How easily it can AI turn text into an image, or text into reply? Do you realize that the data you are not hiding is used to teach an AI how to manipulate you? It knows who you are, what you like, and most importantly - it is slowly learning (on all of the people who "have nothing to hide") exactly what to show to you on FB/YT, to eventually manipulate you into doing whatever they asked it to do.

Do you spend a lot of time on YT/FB/IG? Are you happy with doing that, or do you think you should be spending more time doing something else? The more data they have from anyone, including you, the better will the AI be at simply keeping you glued to the screen no matter what. And it's only a matter of time before someone uses it to change how you vote, or what you think. And you will not notice that, because it has so much data about you, and so much data about everyone, that it's as good at manipulating you without you noticing based on the data it has about you, as Midjourney is in generating pictures based on the text you give to it. And the only way how they could teach Midjourney to do that, was by giving it a lot of data about pictures.

Well, maybe you are:

• Planning a surprise party
• Leaving a job
• Trying to escape an abusive relationship
• Famous
• Writing a detective novel
• A writer without a publisher
• Searching about an embarrassing medical condition
• Having a crush in someone
• In the closet
• A teenager with controlling parents
• Having a hobby that's considered embarrassing or childish
• Having a psycho stalker
• Buying a present from Santa
• A reporter who doesn't want to reveal their sources
• Buying a toilet and you don't want toilet recommendations for the rest of your life
• Lending your computer to someone, and you don't want your recommended videos to change
• Under an NDA

... Or maybe you're talking with someone who's in one of those categories.

We have to normalise privacy in order to keep these people safe. For instance, it's a stupid example but it works, if I always use private browser windows, my husband won't suspect anything when I'm looking for a gift for him.

That's only the tip of the iceberg and it's not even touching some bigger problems:

• You can be profiled based on your likes, social media posts, purchase history, etc, and maybe used for election results manipulation, or who knows what else. That's not a conspiracy theory, it has happened, see for instance Cambridge Analytica.
• Maybe the political situation will change in the future. Oops, now your data is suddenly in the hands of a malicious dictator.
• If you keep a backdoor open to let the "good and trusted" actors in, there's no way to not let malicious actors in as well.