Firstly, I’m not against privacy or anything, just ignorant. I do try to stay pretty private despite that.
I wanted to know what type of info (Corporations? Governments? Websites??) Typically get from you and how they use it and how that affects me.
Let me tell you a story. Many years ago I worked for big banks and insurance companies. One day I was tasked with a project. It was an amazing, from the tech point of view, project. It was something like this: a user navigates to a bank website looking for information about some product. The website presents the user a simple contact form - first name, last name, phone number and/or email. Based on provided data bank would use it to update user data (if there was no official account it would update the “ghost” account, aka “I know about you, but you don’t know about me”). Next the bank would scrape all publicly available social media accounts and build the “hidden” profile (I’ll get to this later). Based on all that data, user would be assigned a score based on which all future interaction with a bank would be determined. For a regular person this would mean that “I’m sorry but according to our system we cannot give you a loan”.
Now, about the “hidden” profile. It’s a thing that all big companies (including banks and insurance companies) hold. It’s all the data collected from all publicly available profiles (and sometimes from the shady sites), used to create a profile that’s not visible to a frontline workers and it’s referenced as a “system decided based on your data”.
Now, to make this more scary. This happened 10-15 years ago. Way before the so called AI. Imagine how much more data those companies have about you in today’s world and how good they are in processing it.
Now i have another question. What’s the issue if they’re ONLY using this info to improve my experience or make sensible business decisions?
They are using the info to engineer more efficient ways to separate you from your money. It’s not a benefit to you in any way.
I would have to assume that if I’m buying the product, i want it
Hey guys, this right here is a super valuable point to address and really strikes straight to the heart of the ability of a system like this to give the illusion of choice. People absolutely will still think, despite this, they are still in control and we need to address it not dismiss it.
I’m undoing the downvote on this comment, it absolutely is a big part of the conversation, even if you think it’s naive.
In addition to everythong everyone has said, one major thing that people often don’t think about privacy is how it relates to enshittification.
Modern software services try to optimize everything to make as much money as possible. Everything is a/b tested, and whatever increases some arbitrary metric is what gets released.
They do this by tracking a ton of metrics about how you interact with everything. I know where I work we collect data about every time you click on anything, how long you hover over buttons, etc.
There was a jogging app known as Strava that posted an image on their Twitter that was a heatmap of all the jogging activities of all of their users. Their idea was just to show how popular their app was by showing the entire world lit up. Twitter users were able to locate secret US military bases on that data alone. Turns out nobody jogs in circles in the middle of the desert except GIs.
Recently a group of Harvard students did a demo where they used Meta’s camera glasses and a chain of commercial programs and products to find out people’s names, address, workplaces, and family based only on their facial data.
These are just two examples off the top of my head. Essentially, the more data someone can accumulate, the more info can be analyzed from it. With things like AI tools, that analysis is incredibly fast even with huge datasets.
For me, there are several very different good reasons. I write Them down in order they come to my mind not from imoortant to less important or vice versa.
- i dont want to be judged before met in Person
What do companies do before they hire you, banks that you ask for money etc. They look you up in the net before they meet you. Think they know you. No Chance to present yourself as you want it. Yes you can polish your social media but not all the hidden profiles they made of you…
- stalking
i once studied in a different country. Had 3 dates with someone i only realized then is weird and kindly ended dating. Then this person was stalking me for a year and only stopped thx to the police intervening after a lot of efford from my side. Luckily the person only had my email and phone contact and new which city I came from. I was SO glad Ive never been much on social media and stuff… Cause this person would have come to my hometown, waiting in front of my university or whatever - even wrote so. But couldn’t find out. Most of my friends back then had their address / favorite bars / university courses favorites places and everythign in the net. I was so scared back then i would have changed my entire life to be sure not to Meet this Person. Luckily i didnt have to cause my life was private. If you think stalking is very rare and you will not be affected look up the numbers. Its horryfying. For woman especially but also men. People dont talk about it but During that time when speaking to friends i suddenly knew 5 other people who had to deal with it already. Also nowadays these apps exist were you can take a picture of someone and search for that face in the Internet… A stranger can do that and find all your photos/ social media etc and be there in your favorite bar every nicht… Scary.
- data is power.
On the " i have nothing to hide" thing. Think of Google maps. They dont care where you go at all but by knowing where everyone goes they can predict traffic, give u alternative routes and theoretically they could also causetrafficb jams… :D while maps is useful they can do the same with any information. they are not interested in your political views but by knowing everyones political views they can predict and also direct them. This isnt theoretical its used in elections already. There was a scandal a few years ago about brexit ithinlk.
- i like to have control about myself
Sometimes i might even agree to share some data for something else but i am forced to it all the time and i have no control whats done with the data to whom its sold next etc. But its still my personal data …
- governments/ laws change
Well i am german, actually from an eastgerman family. If my family teached me anything its that political systems can change very easily. My greatgrandparents, my grandparents, my Parents and i grew up in 4 different political systems, well actually 5 :D. Every system of those had different views of who is good and Bad And it was better they dont know everything about you…
I’m probably gonna mess this quote up, but I thought it was brilliant:
“Privacy is essential to security, and shitty people feel entitled to take that away from you.”
You can’t be secure in your dealings or operate on equal footing (economically speaking, as others here have pointed out) without a measure of privacy.
10 years ago by having your full name and face your whole data would be in risk of exposure like all social media apps your online footprint etc, etc and in the wrong hands hackers for example can do god knows what with it like sell your data to your enemies track it against you to steal your bank informations whatever they can put their hands on…
Nowadays they only need your face, almost everyone in the world has had uploaded a picture of them online somewhere and that’s enough to dox you and again your online digital footprint and again for whatever reason they want to possibly hurt you,
However having digital privacy forbids this data from leaking to the wrong hands and makes you a little more secure, just knowing little bit about your private life is sometimes enough to track you and open a weakness to take advantage of. this age isn’t for nuclear wars it’s about digital wars and data is power.
I feel like being spied on on the Internet is kind of like having a camera in your bathroom.
Sure they promise they’re only going to point it at the sink and just make sure that you’re engaging in proper toothbrushing habits.
Sure.
But they’ll set it at the point where the mirror shows the shower and the toilet and they’ve got smell detectors in there to determine how much food you’ve eaten and how well your digesting it and there’s a sensor in the toilet to check the content of your urine and then if you drink too much they’re going to tell your boss that you’ve been drinking because they detected the alcohol that your body flushed out in your urine when you peed.
And you have no control over who gets to see what’s going on in your bathroom.
It is morally wrong and psychologically oppressing to be spied upon.
And the powers that be are so focused on the benefits it gives them that they do not care about the negatives that affect us.
SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most
excitedcited and well-read ones is called “I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.”The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It’s about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.
le user generated summary (no gee-pee-tee was used in this process):
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Section I. Introduction
skip :3
Section II. The “Nothing to Hide” argument
We expand the “nothing to hide” argument to a more compelling, defensible thesis. That way we can attack it more cleanly
“The NSA surveillance, data mining, or other government information- gathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Only those who are engaged in illegal activities have a reason to hide this information. Although there may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy. Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information.” (p. 753, or pdf page 9)
Section III. Conceptualizing Privacy
A. A Pluralistic Conception of Privacy (aka “what’s the definition”)
Privacy can’t be defined as intimate information (Social Security/religion isn’t “intimate”), or the right to be let alone (shoving someone and not leaving them alone isn’t a privacy violation), or 1984 Orwell surveillant chilling social control (your beverage use history isn’t social control) (p. 755-756 or pdf page 11-12).
Privacy is kind of blobby so we define it as a taxonomy of similar stuff:
- Information Collection
- Surveillance
- Interrogation
- Main problem: “an activity by a person, business, or government entity creates harm by disrupting valuable activities of others” whether disruption is physical, emotional, chilling of socially beneficial behavior like free speech, or causing of power imbalances like executive branch power.
- Information Processing
- Aggregation
- Identification
- Insecurity: Information might be abused. You can think of ways ;)
- Secondary Use
- Exclusion: People have no access nor say in how their data is used
- Information Dissemination
- Breach of Confidentiality
- Disclosure
- Exposure
- Increased Accessibility
- Blackmail
- Appropriation
- Distortion
- Main problem: How info can transfer or be threatened to transfer
- Invasion
- Intrusion
- Decisional Interference
- Main problem: Your decisions are regulated
(p. 758-759, or pdf page 14-15)
So privacy is a set of protections against a set of related problems (p. 763-764 or pdf page 19-20).
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B. The Social Value of Privacy
Some utilitarians like Etzioni frame society needs and individual needs as a dichotomy where society should usually win (p. 761 or pdf page 17). Others like Dewey thinks “individual rights are not trumps, but are protections by society from its intrusiveness” that should be measured in welfare, not utility. “Part of what makes a society a good place in which to live is the extent to which it allows people freedom from the intrusiveness of others” (p. 762 or pdf page 18). So, privacy can manifest in our right to not be intruded.
Section IV. The problem with the “Nothing to Hide” argument
A. Understanding the Many Dimensions of Privacy
Privacy isn’t about hiding a wrong, concealment, or secrecy (p. 764 or pdf page 20).
Being watched’s “chilling effects [i.e. getting scared into not doing something] harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity”; but even so, it’s kinda super hard to prove that a chilling effect happened so it’s easy for a Nothing to Hider to say that the NSA’s “limited surveillance of lawful activity will not chill behavior sufficiently to outweigh the security benefits” (p. 765 or pdf page 21). Personal damage from privacy is hard to prove by nature, but it still exists.
If we use the taxonomy, we notice that the NSA thingamabob has:
- Aggregation: if some mysterious guy Kafkaesquely compiles a crapton of data without any of your knowledge – with human bureaucratic “indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability” – then they could pretty easily decide that they can guess what you might be wanting to hide or predict what People Like You might do later. Oopsie: it’s kind of hard to refute or hide a “future” behavior.
- Exclusion: You have no idea what they’re doing or if it is CORRECT information. That’s a kind of due process problem and a power imbalance – the NSA is insulated from accountability even though they have hella power over citizens.
- Secondary use: “The Administration said little about how long the data will be stored, how it will be used, and what it could be used for in the future. The potential future uses of any piece of personal information are vast, and without limits or accountability on how that information is used, it is hard for people to assess the dangers of the data being in the government’s control”
But then the Nothing to Hide argument only focuses on one or two definitions but not others. So it’s unproductive.
(p. 766-767 or pdf page 22-23)
B. Understanding Structural Problems
Privacy isn’t usually one big harm, like that one thing where Rebecca Schaefer and Amy Boyer were killed by a DMV-data-using stalker and database-company-using stalker respectively (p. 768 or pdf page 24); it’s closer to a bunch of minor things like how gradual pollution is.
Airlines violated their privacy policies after 9/11 by giving the government a load of passenger info. Courts decided the alleged contractual damage wasn’t anything and rejected the contract claim. However, this breach of trust falls under the secondary use taxonomy thing and is a power imbalance in the social trust between corpo and individual: if the stated promise is meaningless, companies can do whatever they want with data – this is a structural harm even if it’s hard to prove your personal damages (p.769-770 or pdf page 25-26)
There should be oversight – warrants need probable cause, wiretaps should be minimal and with judicial supervision – Bush oopsied here (p. 771 or pdf page 27).
“Therefore, the security interest should not get weighed in its totality against the privacy interest. Rather, what should get weighed is the extent of marginal limitation on the effectiveness of a government information gathering or data mining program by imposing judicial oversight and minimization procedures. Only in cases where such procedures will completely impair the government program should the security interest be weighed in total, rather than in the marginal difference between an unencumbered program versus a limited one. Far too often, the balancing of privacy interests against security interests takes place in a manner that severely shortchanges the privacy interest while inflating the security interests. Such is the logic of the nothing to hide argument” (p. 771-772 or pdf page 27-28).
Section V. Conclusion
Nothing to Hide defines privacy too narrowly and ignores the other problems of surveillance and data mining.
- Information Collection
Just because you feel you may have nothing to hide now, doesnt mean that information could be very worth hiding in the future.
Governments change.
Laws change.
Dictators, autocrats, police states, abhors dissent. Free thought and peace of mind is what you’re protecting.
And even then, even if you somehow trust that your current political landscape won’t ever go down that route, if lawful invasion into your privacy is legally possible, then it is also illegally possible, and you’re way more of a target for scams, identity theft etc.
Also: Saying you have nothing to hide is like saying you have nothing to say
— Edward Snowden
