HN Reader

If I've learned something during my early adulthood it's that, it's impossible to not be in conflict with at least some people, because even if you're the most fair and considerate person on the planet, other people will prey on you to try to encroach on your territory and steal what you have.

So the idea that you have nothing to hide is completely banal. Those who are more powerful than you won't leave you alone just because you ignore them. They will eventually come knocking to steal your wealth and your freedom.

I think that "nothing to hide" is a strawman.

No one really says that in an absolute sense, it is always in context, what it usually means is "I trust a particular institution with the data they collect", not "I will give my credit card number to everyone who asks".

For example, let's say you approve of installing security cameras monitored by police in your residence, if you say "I have nothing to hide" what you are actually meaning is "there is nothing these cameras can see that I would want to hide from the police". I think it is obvious that it doesn't mean you approve of having the same cameras installed in your bathroom.

The real question is one of trust and risk assessment. Are the risks of revealing a piece of information worth it? how much do you trust the other party? not the literal meaning of "nothing to hide".

Everyone has some economic game going on. If some entity can see most of the cards you hold, it like putting your cards open on the table during a poker game. That is why big companies want your data, they want to peek at the cards of as much players in the game as possible.

Secrecy is good

Privacy is good

Crime is not necessarily bad

You don't have to even go Anne Frank to make the argument.

Secret agencies are good customers of data brokers or sometimes even their owners.

The data broker eco system is notoriously intransparent and dynamic.

It's not that I have nothing to hide. It's that I have nothing I want to share.

I have no idea how people can be so shortsighted as to utter “I have nothing to hide”.

Not only that’s very rarely true as the article shows pretty nicely… what is legal changes, sometimes drastically and rapidly.

Especially relevant today in the context of this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46895860

Everyone who has been helping Google/Amazon/Meta construct their digital panopticons is culpable in at least some small way for the abuse that may follow.

One of my favorite bit about “if you have nothing to hide…” is asking folks if they’d be willing to take the door off their bathroom when they went to use it.

"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" Eric Schmidt - Google CEO in 2009

193 files for Eric Schmidt according to https://www.wired.com/story/epstein-files-tech-elites-gates-...

314 files for Larry Page

294 files for Sergey Brin

Interesting rhetoric. It's always the people you suspect the most?

> For many years this system served well

Surely don't need to ditch the whole system then and just needs a better kill-switch.

random book on privacy summarized counter argument to "nothing to hide - nothing to fear" like so: unnecessary decrease in privacy unnecessarily increases the surface of attack. effectively this leads to public shaming and targeted isolation of individuals. great for getting rid of business competition

(2015)