Privacy and the "Nothing To Hide" Argument

privacyprof writes "One of the most common responses of those unconcerned about government surveillance or privacy invasions is 'I've got nothing to hide.' According to the 'nothing to hide' argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The 'nothing to hide' argument is quite prevalent. Is there a way to respond to this argument that would really register with people in the general public? In a short essay, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, Professor Daniel Solove takes on the 'nothing to hide' argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings." At the base of the fallacy, as Bruce Schneier has noted, is the "faulty premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong."

Comments

Re:Equating public monitoring to Privacy violation

[Elemenope]

A person has a reasonable expectation that if they are on a street, that other people will be able to physically see them.

I would argue they do NOT have a reasonable expectation that, simply because they are walking down the street, their movements will be catalogued and recorded and placed in a database such that those movements are accessible to government/private enterprise/creepy stalkers, nor do most people believe that it is appropriate that such logs of public movements are kept about them.

That's the difference.

The disconnect is that because of distributed surveillance (i.e. the ubiquity of video cameras), it is no longer necessary to have a guy follow around the surveilled subject with a camera/pad of paper in order to form an effective record of movements, destinations, and public activities. Thus people can brush it off because it is not directed *at them* personally. The end effect is the same, however. Distributed technologies in general are scary because one of the main psychological effects of distribution is that people no longer recognize what they used to be able to recognize easily as the consequences proceeding from the action because its corporeal 'source' is diffuse.