it’s a false dichotomy; the issue is not whether you do or don’t have something to hide, the issue is you choosing what you share and with whom.

the fact that I don’t blast the quality of this morning’s stool accross all my social media outlets doesn’t mean that I’m hiding it, it means that I choose not to share it.

that’s my decision and I don’t allow my hardware, software, service provider, government, or whoever-the-fuck to make it for me.

In Germany there’s a private company called SCHUFA that aggregates data about people, mangles them in a proprietary (i.e. secret) way and produces a “score” indicating how creditworthy an individual is. Companies buy these scores from SCHUFA, that’s how they make a profit.

One of the data points influencing the score is a person’s address. If you live near people of whom SCHUFA thinks they’re not creditworthy, your own score will drop, too. So by simply sharing their your address, you may already suffer detrimental consequences against which they have no recourse.

This is another instance of the “being put in categories you don’t want to be in” point in favor of privacy.

Why you should care?

Because the debate is not about whether or not you have something to hide.

It’s about your right to consent. You should have the right to say no. And you should have the right to change your mind for any reason. You should have the right to regain control of who can store, access or process your data.

Depending on where you live you may have such rights, or you may not. And the political debate is about granting, strengthening, weakening or revoking these rights. And you should care about having these rights, whether you use them or not.

One thing I’ve used to get really thoughtful responses out of people who “don’t care” is “Yeah, things may be fine now (they’re not) but what if some future fascist regime comes to power in 8 years? 12 years? All these records of your information will STILL exist.”

3 things I learned from getting these reactions:

1. These people (mostly) actually DO care. They just don’t think they can do anything about it / have the skills / time / energy to do anything about it / think they will lose access to the services they rely in if they take steps to protect themselves. So they justify not taking any action or changing their behavior and say they don’t care because it makes it easier to live with the toxic data harvesting they actually DO KNOW is going on and just don’t really want to think about too hard.

2. On some level, they have decided to “pay the price” for convenient access to things like Facebook, Insta and Google Maps. They may not LIKE the pricetag, not really, but they’ve decided it’s worth it and because they don’t really like the price tag they embrace psychological tricks to avoid thinking about it, worrying about or stressing about it (like telling yourself and others “why do I care? I have nothing to hide.”)

3. The most discouraging thing I learned from this is that, short of proof of immediate, existential danger from their existing usage patterns, they probably won’t change, even when you crack their defences with an angle they haven’t thought of. They’ve already decided there’s no escape for them and oh well, it’s worth it. They’ll stay there EVEN THOUGH they’re bothered by the same things you are.

Thanks for the great share. I try to convince my loved ones of the value of even small, low effort ways to control their data slug trail. They don’t get it. Not even a little bit. And the vast majority of people won’t care until we’re all living in a black mirror episode.

Are we already living in a black mirror episode? Fuck.

TL;DR: without privacy you can (and will) be discriminated against, because that’s what people do and there is financial incentive to do so on-top of that.

A basic examples being higher insurance premiums because of known factors that are out of your control.

But it’s pervasive. Other people have already posted more thorough examples.

Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.

And of course maybe you’ve got nothing too hide today. But what about tomorrow. What if something that is perfectly acceptable today becomes illegal tomorrow, what is a dictatorship takes over your country and wants to search for undesirables. If there are no privacy systems in place they can just look at publicly available data.

What if you are targeted by a hate group who used publicly available information to find victims?

I have nothing to hide is such a stupid attitude because it assumes that you will always agree with the government and that the government will never change or do anything directly to harm you. It smacks at a lack of imagination.

To quote the girl in Anon:

It’s not that I have something to hide. I have nothing I want you to see.

I hide not because I’m ashamed of how I live. I’m happy I live this way and believe it to be extremely ethical. Try telling my country folk though that it’s ethical for me to be transgender, gay, and polyamorous and you might start an argument. And however you live might wind up controversial too

People trust companies. People don’t trust people.

They’re right, people do, but those people are missing a crucial point:

Companies are just groups of people.

Whenever someone says: “I have nothing to hide”

I say: “You’re not the one who decides that”

Speaking of privacy and tracking, would anyone know of a location app that can be trusted not to sell the tracking data? My family uses Life360 so that we can track our children’s locations as they commute to and from school.or.run around the neighborhood, that sort.of thing. We have Android phones. I’m under the impression that if we all had iPhones we could track them using Apple apps,.which would not do anything funky with the data. This is something I wasn’t too worried about until reading more about privacy, but I still need to know where my kids are.