Comment by Quequau
6 years ago
In my personal experience the people who use the 'I have nothing to hide' argument, use it because they are unwilling to expend the cognitive effort to delve into the topic in any meaningful way.
Trying to reason with someone about some topic they didn't use reason to get to their position on in the first place is often a losing proposition.
So these days I just say "if you don't want to even think about some problem or issue, you should just come out and say 'I don't want to think about this' instead of saying something so obviously and unambiguously ignorant. That just makes you look bad". Then I move on. I can't make folks think. I can't save them from themselves and their privacy isn't the hill I'm going to die on.
>So these days I just say "if you don't want to even think about some problem or issue, you should just come out and say 'I don't want to think about this' instead of saying something so obviously and unambiguously ignorant. That just makes you look bad". Then I move on.
That seems overly dismissive and presumptuous.
Of course it's dismissive. This is because "I don't have anything to hide" is not an invitation for some long drawn out discussion about the intersection of philosophy, technology, culture, and civil rights. It's a no-thought dismissal. Pretending it's anything else is a waste of time and fundamentally dishonest.