Comment by wing-_-nuts
21 hours ago
Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about', but my line of thinking is not 'do i trust the government' it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data'
Given how fast and lose I've seen the DODGE folks play with the data they have, absolutely not. I still shudder over the fact that my OPM data was hacked years ago
> Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about',
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden
Locks on bathroom doors are for privacy, not security.
Meaning what?
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Snowden is comparing two things that, in fact, are not alike. Surveillance gathers information, whereas censorship suppresses expression. It might sound like clever rhetoric to people of a lower intellectual capacity, but these are fundamentally distinct concepts.
Or he was not comparing those two things to say they are the same thing but rather making an analogy based on the common factor of people in the US often wanting legal protections for both speech and privacy to draw his point that one is giving up their rights by making the excuse about not wanting privacy which they would probably not do when it comes to speech.
Thinking comparisons of two similar things are always for the purpose of saying that they are the same thing is ridiculous, don’t you think? It might sound like clever reasoning to people of a mediocre intellectual capacity but it is not logically coherent.
> Surveillance gathers information, whereas censorship suppresses expression.
Surveillance suppresses expression through chilling effects.
He's comparing two rights and how giving up one right (to privacy) because you think you have nothing to hide is like giving up your right to speech, because you have nothing to say (and therefore don't have to worry that someone in power might find it offensive).
> it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data'
And even this assumes that the government can and will protect the data from the various bad actors who want it, something they have absolutely failed to do on multiple occasions.
You forgot that your government is the bad actor. For them the laws do not apply
if you're not doing anything wrong, a government that is doing something wrong may not like it
This, exactly.
And governments are always doing something wrong...
It's not "if you're not doing anything wrong" you need to worry about, it's "what will they make wrong down the road to trip me up" you need to consider.
I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed..
After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.
Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.
My uncle married a woman with the same first and middle name as one of his sisters. My new aunt chose to use her husband’s name as her married name, without hyphenation or anything. His sister, my aunt, never married. One was an RN and the other is an LPN.
They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town.
When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.
I’m missing something. Was your uncles spouse alive after your uncles sister passed?
Funny. I have a brother. We have at times lived together, went to the same school, and after not living together, lived on the same street. A couple of times, one or more credit bureaus decided we were the same person and silently merged our credit files. Not a nightmare per se since we're both fiscally (mostly) responsible, but we generally find out how incompetent the bureaus are when we're trying to make some very large transaction (I was trying to buy a car, he was trying to buy a building for work) and suddenly get "why do you own 2 houses, a bunch of cars, and you're apparently a bigamist". And then we had to scramble to untangle the whole mess. Lawyers were involved. The bureaus do not care in the slightest.
That's funny as a human, amazing as a developer, and terrifying as a data processor. All at the same time.
I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.
I'm a man in my 40s. My eldest daughter is 17. We have the same first name (spelled differently, at least) and have had many cases where medical records have gotten confused.
We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.
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They both showed up in person, because that was NOT the first time that had happened.
I have two younger brothers. They have the same last name, first initial, a history of having lived at the same address, and the same birth date, because they're twins.
Every time one of them goes to a particular medical facility, he has to explicitly decline having them merge their charts.
A couple years ago the WSJ had a feature article on the phenomenon of married couples who shared the same given name:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/taylor-lautner-taylor-dome-wife...
Some time in the 90s I used to live at XXX Some Street West apt #1234 and my close friend at XXX Some Street East apt #1234. One day someone knocks on the door. I open and there is a pizza man. We argued for a while and he kept insisting that I did order it. Finally I asked him to show the order. Of course it was all the same but East instead of West. Anyways I called my friend and thanked for a pizza. This was so funny.
Being married to someone with the same name could be very confusing!
How?
Does anyone ever actually use that line? Most people will argue that the trade off in privacy is worth it for security.
That is, if you frame your argument such that you believe people don’t understand the trade off it allows you to not engage with the fact they just disagree with your conclusion.
Have you ever sat on a jury in a criminal case? A frighteningly high percentage of people will swallow every lie a cop tells, even when thoroughly discredited in cross-examination. There's no shortage of people to guard the concentration camps.
You don't even need to leave your basement, or even this website to see this in action. A frightening number of people are totally subservient to the government and place blind faith in politicians and their paid-for "experts" and bureaucrats and regulators.
I've been on a grand jury... the cops lied through their teeth, couldn't keep their stories straight through a prepared monologues reading from notes and ... everyone in the room picked up on it and didn't indict the suspects. Our grand jury was so cynical the DAs stopped giving us cases and made the other two grand juries stay late to make up for the lost capacity. It was great. We did something good. And it was just a bunch of random people from Brooklyn.
The establishment likes to pat the establishment on the back but ordinary people seem to know what's up. In my minimal experience, anyway.
(One thing to keep in mind... grand juries really are a cross-section of the population, whereas lawyers get to select jurors after talking to them, so there is some selection bias on ordinary juries that grand juries don't have.)
I was on a jury a few years ago. The defendent was a homeless person with mental health issues. The cop was obviously lying about the one thing that was the core element of the crime. It was like a child telling the truth about every element of the indoor soccer game expect the part where they were the one who kicked the ball.
The jury was me, (white) nine other white people, and two brown people. Me and the brown people thought the cop was obviously lying, and was therefore not guilty. The nine other people thought he was guilty.
Like the cop was obviously fucking lying.
After three days of deliberation we declared a hung jury.
I was speaking with the prosecutor afterwards and he mentioned they were going for the felony version of the crime instead of the misdemeanor (he was obviously guilty of the misdemeanor, the felony depended on the element the cop was lying about) because the dude was a bad dude and they needed to get him.
I looked him up when I got home. (I didn't look him up during the trial, they expressly forbid you from doing that) He had done something bad and went to prison for four years. He did his time and got out. They were still trying to throw the book at him for bullshit.
I looked him up recently. He was never convicted of anything ever again, but died in jail two years after we declared a hung jury. Prosecutor got what he wanted in the end, I suppose.
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What does this have to do with what he just said?
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Yes all the time and it’s not worth debating them as they are not about to say anything interesting.
Usually just make a quip about having curtains then move onto discussing just how moist the turkey is this year
Constantly. Most people have a hard time dealing with tradeoffs and think in absolutes. It goes along with "if you're not a criminal, you have nothing to fear from police," another disturbingly common sentiment.
Some prominent examples:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22832263
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSVJmOajGDe/
https://thestandard.nz/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you-have-...
> Does anyone ever actually use that line?
Not that exact phrase, it is too elaborate. Most people grunt "eh, don't care" and "it's free, right?"
The average person really is that apathetic.
> Does anyone ever actually use that line?
Yes, I've heard that exact wording from cops.
From normal people, the more common way of saying it is along the lines of "well I don't really care if the cops see anything on my computer".
The mistake would be reading Hacker News and walking away with the conclusion that because people don't post that reasoning here that it doesn't exist (and even then, you do find that does come up here on occasion). People with "nothing to hide" do actually believe that, and while they may not post it to HN for vigorous debate. The easy counterexample from history is the list of Jews kept by the Netherlands which was later used against them after they were conquered by Nazi Germany, but you'd have to interested in history to buy that reason. Some people simply shrug at the "if you don't have anything to hide then you won't mind me filming your bedroom" scenario as you being the creep in the equation. Some people just don't want the trouble and are fine with being surveiled because the powers that be are doing it.
To correct the mangling of history, there was no "list of Jews kept by the Netherlands [pre-occupation]". There were only pre-existing Dutch population registries of all people, where the personal details collected by the Dutch had included religion, not for any ill purpose.
(The Nazis subsequently compiled a list, post-occupation, but that's not what you asserted.)
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The reasoning sounds like status quo from the majority group who hasn't experienced discrimination and thinks the powers that be could never become like those awful countries with dictators. Also a complete lack of imagination (and knowledge of the past) about how something considered legal and common now could become criminalized.
I'd go further and say that checks on police and intelligence agencies exist to protect both the innocent and the guilty from abuse of power.
If I'm doing something wrong, the onus is on the government to prove this within the rules established to prevent such abuse (and on the people, their elected representatives, and the judiciary to ensure these rules are sufficient to accommodate the interests of all parties involved).
So, in theory, you do agree with the current fisa setup and were just haggling over details.
And if we're talking about 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about' - the other irony is they probably are doing something wrong. There are a lot of rules out there. The only reason it isn't being bought up in the conversation is because the person has a certain level of privacy.
One of the interesting things the Epstein drama has kicked up is legal or not, the powerful get up to some wild things at parties. And in their business dealings just based on the background number of scandals. If there is an organised group of people allowed to look there is just endless blackmail material which is going to get used, just like LOVEINT.
People who are paying attention see that the government is changing rules daily. Feel safe today? Wait until tomorrow when Trump decides he wants to do something that you're in the way of.
Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about'
The people who say "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide" simply don't understand that it's not their call.
> but my line of thinking is not 'do i trust the government' it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data'
This is how I view privacy as well. You never know who will be in power and who will access that information in the future with ill intent.
This line of thinking kept me away from the Mpls ICE protests. All of the people that protested had their face, phone, and license plate recorded and documented.
I’m not even afraid of being persecuted by the current administration, it’s the possibility of a much worse administration in the future that gave me pause.
This is why I deleted all of my social media when it began to look like Trump was going to win his second term. I had already suffered enough harassment and death threats from the Nextdoor app and a bit of the same from Facebook.
I know I'm already on some GOP list somewhere, but I figured I'd do whatever I could do to protect myself and my family from the local MAGAs in my area.
Not even future governments. There's also this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/salt-typhoon-hack-show...
I’m not even afraid of being persecuted by the current administration, it’s the possibility of a much worse administration in the future that gave me pause.
Unfortunately, your (entirely understandable) position is exactly what will enable such an administration to come to power.
What you are doing in 2026 is what you would have done in 1936.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
> Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about'
The right way to reply to that is: not everything that's legal must be public.
You probably don't want the rest of the world to see you poop, or pick your nose, or listen to every word you say. Almost everyone has things they'd be embarrassed to disclose to other people. And this can be weaponized against you should any rival gain access to it.
"If you have money in your pocket you always have something to worry about."
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DOGE != DODGE
They may have dodged, ducked, dodged the rules while they DOGE'd their way through the government, but not sure if they used RAM trucks while they did it