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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To quote the girl in Anon:
It’s not that I have something to hide. I have nothing I want you to see.
I have a similar one. I’ve nothing to hide, and nothing you need to know.
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
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.
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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:
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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.
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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.”)
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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.
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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?expired
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).
Well we’ve spent a lot of time isolated with only them for company, or other humans filtered through them. They’re rubbing off on us.
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.
