1y ago

I have nothing to hide, why should I care about privacy?

Ever thought, "Why should I care about online privacy? I have nothing to hide." Read this https://www.socialcooling.com/

credit: [deleted] user on Reddit.

original link: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/savz9u/i_have_nothing_to_hide_why_should_i_care_about/

u/magicmulder

The main issue isn’t that someone would be interested in you personally but that data mining may put you in categories you don’t want to be in. 99.9% correlation of your „likes“ and follows to those of terror suspects - whoops you’re a terror suspect yourself. You follow heavy metal bands and Harley Davidson? Whoops, you have a 98% likelihood of drinking and smoking, up goes your insurance rate. And so on.

u/Mayayana

Indeed. But most people here seem to have misunderstood your post. One of my favorite examples is from Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, whoo said in an interview (on youtube) that if you think you have something to hide then maybe you shouldn't be doing what you're doing. (Like maybe the Jews on Kristallnacht shouldn't have been living in their houses?) Schmidt was later reported to have got an apartment in NYC without a doorman, to avoid gossip about his promiscuous lifestyle. :)

u/SandboxedCapybara

I always thought the like "no bathroom door," "no curtains," or "no free speech" arguments always fell flat when talking about privacy. Sure, as people who already care about privacy they make sense, but for people who don't they are just such hollow arguments. I think a better argument is real life issues that people always face. The fact that things like their home address, social security number, face, email, phone number, passwords, their emails and texts, etc could be out there for anyone to see soon or may already be is almost always more concerning for people. People trust companies. People don't trust people.

u/Striking-Implement52

Another good read: https://thenewoil.org/why.html 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

etc

55 comments

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.
- And if that wasn't enough, their new app violates the law, collecting and sending analytics data without user consent. But no court ever gives a fuck, they all swallow the whole legitimate interest bullshit, that has no actual basis.
  Sorry, had to rant a little.
- You’re right that this is horrifying but as an American working on data broker consumer privacy issues this is hilariously quaint. The problem is so, so much worse in the states. There’s an entire industry of SCHUFAs collecting and segmenting audiences in literally hundreds of thousands of different ways, wrapping themselves in the cloak of “Consumer Reporting Agencies” and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Data brokers are the bane of our existence, the worst thing that no one is aware of in our modern world.
- We call that redlining in the US and it's often tied up with race over here, which can quickly get a credit company into lawsuits https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
  
  (Though that said, it's probably way worse in the States than in Germany...)
  
  One of the issues is here in Germany we basically got a monopoly. The Schufa is so omnipresent I used to think it was lead by the government. You cannot open a bank account in Germany without giving your data to them. You almost cannot rent or buy anything on credit without their credit score. Yet they are a private profit driven company which doesn't even tell how the score is calculated. And which is proven to not follow some laws. But noone does anything. Boggles the mind.
- Insurance companies the world over already do this. If you live in a high crime area based on insurance claims your insurance will be higher. Has nothing to do with privacy.
  
  IMHO insurance is another thing. If the insurance company has reliable (statistical) proof that I live in a neighborhood where, for instance, my property is more likely to get damaged, then it’s only right (and fair towards the other insurants) that my fees are higher.
  Living in a poor neighborhood, on the other hand, does not imply that I, personally, am less likely to pay back loans.

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.

Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.

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.
- Insurance being higher has nothing to do with privacy though. If you live in an area that the insurance company has a higher number of claims from, you’re statistically more likely to make a claim, so they charge more to factor that risk in.
  That’s not anything to do with privacy though. How do you think someone’s privacy is breached in that situation?

To quote the girl in Anon:
It's not that I have something to hide. I have nothing I want you to see.

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.
- expired
  
  @7heo
  What about using the tor network and not sharing. Then that can make profile of us that will be anonymous. Until they figure more behavior and compared with our old data. At the end what can we do?
  @dingdongitsabear @privacy

I’m more interested in privacy to prevent access to my data stream and PLANTING incriminating data. It’s a hell of a lot easier to frame someone when you have easy access to their devices.
TL/DR; You may have nothing to hide but you’ve got plenty to protect.

Whenever someone says: "I have nothing to hide"
I say: "You're not the one who decides that"
- So true!

"Having something to hide" is a moving target. With good privacy practices it doesn't matter what the definition of "something to hide" becomes.

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.

The statement about people trust corporations, not people is valid; that’s why I stopped using the “don’t have doors” and “let me see your phone” argument because people will think it’s different in that you personally know them, instead of some faceless corporation collecting your data.
It got me thinking of a better example, and the one I came up with is baby monitors and home/door cctv cameras. A lot of companies providing those services lack any kind of security in that anyone can potentially see your camera live feed on the internet. Not that anyone’s watching, but someone could if they wanted. So if you’re not hiding anything, would you be fine that your baby monitor can potentially be used for whatever reason even though no one in your social circle can’t “see” it?
- Not that anyone’s watching, but someone could if they wanted
  For the record, browsing and sharing open camera feeds was popular on 4chan's /b/ for a while (like over a decade ago iirc), with commenters treating them like some sort of drama or sitcom. It was fucked up.
  I wouldn't be surprised if there's still those sorts of people around on better hidden forums.

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.

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

Because I'm tired of seeing ads for things I literally just purchased.

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.
- But without the social norms that constrain most of us to not be complete dicks all the time. So they're like antisocial or sociopathic people.
  
  (Which seems to increasingly be everyone I meet these days).
- According to US law, companies are people...

I think the talk about personal privacy is obscuring the real issue. Power corrupts. Data is power. Big data is dangerous. If big tech abuses this power how could you fight it? Because they will notice any resistance and they can remove your visibility. It;s not about whether you personally have something to hide right now, it's that no one will ever be able to hide anything anymore if we continue on this path, and I cannot for the life of me see how that does not end in totalitarianism eventually. I have nothing to hide, but that's irrelevant.

When people in conversations tell me they've got nothing to hide, I routinely ask them for their bank details.

All good points. I would like to add too, that not being the product for companies like Google is also nice.

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:
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.
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.")
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.

their home address, social security number, face, email, phone number, passwords, their emails and texts, etc could be out there for anyone to see soon or may already be
this part is important and few people talk about this. your data is indeed for faceless companies eyes only, but for now.
you'd have to blindly trust all big datas' security practices and that they won't be leaked any time in the future, either by an inside agent or by a security vulnerability.
once upon a time we did the same to our online accounts and used the same password over and over, only to find they were stored as plain text waiting to be leaked...

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.
- Please for all that is good stop using Life360.
  
  I told a friend who works in tech that we use Life360 and he blanched. He began to persuade me it would not be a good thing to use. Thanks to a post here I now turned on location tracking in Google Maps in our phones. I've been hearing that we should try to limit our use of Google but in this instance is it better than Life360? Are there any other alternatives for Android?
- Did you check out Locus? It's an end-to-end encrypted location sharing utility designed for decentralized servers running Nostr. It's free and open source software that secures that your location will most likely never be shared with entities out of your control.
  
  Does Locus allow you to track someone in real time? I couldn't tell from the screenshots.
- I don't know about not selling your tracking data, but why not do location sharing straight with Google maps?
  
  Ohhh, I did not know that was a thing! I will look into that.
- BTW no one “sells” that type of data because it’s the access to it that they want. They will sell access to you via ads, but they won't give over the data. They will let someone pay for ads to be targeted to people that went to X location.
  This is what google do. The person suggesting google maps is literally telling you to use the biggest ad company in the world’s product if you want privacy lol.
  
  Plenty of services that access location information sell “deidentified” datasets with that information all the time. Which are readily and routinely reidentified.
  
  But what would you suggest for Android phones? We need tracking for our kids' commutes.

While most people are horrible judges of character and when even your own family throw you under the bus.... and how a stranger can even cause you much trouble, I could care less about what others may think of me in a world where every lie has become truth and every truth is a mental illness of some kind.
Been homeless most of my life, but I was different than most other homeless people. I had my fair share of problems but I made better choices than anyone else I met with the horrible plague of being homeless. I learned really quick that it doesn't matter who or what you choose to be and it doesn't matter how good of an attitude you have, how great or horrible you are.... you're still not important!
So yeah, all this privacy garbage is just that... "GARBAGE" and the social credit score system can be whatever it wants but I'm not changing or running in fear, nor am I to worry any longer about a dying and broken down society with some bullshit pipe dream of being a better place one day. It's not going to ever be better and it was never good in the beginning.
I'll die as a man of integrity before I take a knee to the enemy!
- Been homeless most of my life, but I was different than most other homeless people. I had my fair share of problems but I made better choices than anyone else I met with the horrible plague of being homeless.
  If that's true, you're exactly the kind of person who is likely to be mistreated as a result of profiling based on tracking your data. These algorithms don't have room for exceptional cases, so you would be handled just like anyone else tagged as having been homeless. This could make it hard for you to get a home or credit or a job, among other things. It could trap a person in homelessness no matter what they do. That's why people oppose this kind of surveillance.

55 comments