Comment by nearbuy

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.