alt Hacker NewsPerhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?
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The "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" people are cheering this on. They don't know or care about any of the things you just said.
I don't have anything to hide but I still close the door when I take a dump.
Good reminder of why people should be wary of governments collecting data because this a stark reminder that the government can change at any time.
"I have nothing to hide" really misses the point of what privacy is for. I don't close the door when I'm taking a crap because I have something to hide, I do it for privacy.
Also, blackmail isn't the only way to have personal or intimate information used against you. As the absolutely massive advertising industry can tell you, knowing more details about people makes them easier to influence and manipulate.
For some people, it literally changes based on the administration. We need to teach people to always be skeptical of government overreach, no matter who is in office.
1. I don't want the federal government to know much about me.
2. I think the federal government executive branch should be able to control itself and inspect itself.
i like to ask those people “fine, but do have shades on your windows? i mean if you have nothing to hide…”
I fear that only very bitter experience will convince those folks.
This is an interesting side effect indeed. The people I know irl who have espoused this view are, ironically, the people who never liked Elon Musk in the first place. It'll be interesting to see how their narrative evolves now, if at all, as they stare at a practical example which contradicts them!
It's a bit of a straw man. I might get labelled as part of that group. But in reality, I have nothing to hide given a search warrant of my digital data, issued by a court in accordance to tight privacy-respecting laws. And I am happy the bandwidth-limited court can issue these against me, and against everyone around me, as opposed to no data ever being available for anyone.
That's quite different to Musk's minions taking a DB dump onto a USB stick.
The "I have nothing to hide" perspective on privacy is immediately revealed as disingenuous when you ask them to place a web cam in their shower.
Privacy clearly is valuable for it's own sake.
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The "I don't have anything to hide" argument usually misses that you can't know today what you should be hiding from the government tomorrow.
You have everything to hide by default and the onus is on every actor to prove why they need information and how it's isolated from other information.