Comment by nearbuy
25 days ago
I'm pro-privacy and I still think these retorts just make it sound like you've put zero effort into understanding what the "nothing to hide" people are trying to articulate.
E.g. "Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"
Very few people are arguing that nudity or bathroom use shouldn't be private, and they are not going to understand what this has to do with their argument that the NSA should be allowed to see Google searches to fight terrorism or whatever.
Privacy arguments are about who should have access to what information. For example, I'm fine with Google seeing my Google searches, but not the government monitoring them.
"I've got nothing to hide." is a rather extreme statement. The people who say it don't mean it literally. But saying something they don't mean aren't really helping their points across. I think OP’s retorts are simply to show how absurd the “I’ve got nothing to hide” claim is, regardless of how effective the retorts are.
I'm not out to defend "I've got nothing to hide", but those who say it are usually saying it about a specific policy (e.g. the NSA monitoring searches). It's usually clear what the context is and that's what you have to argue against to actually engage and convince someone. They probably do mean quite literally that they have nothing to hide from the government. It's not an extreme statement in context.
But on the internet we often do this thing where we take the weakest version or a distorted version of an opposing side's argument and ridicule that. It's not quite strawmanning because we never specified who we're arguing against, and surely we can imagine someone, somewhere on the internet has the ridiculous viewpoint. But it's not a common viewpoint (that, for example, we shouldn't have privacy in the bathroom). Doing this only gets us pats on the back from those who already agree with us and deludes us about our opponent's position.