What are you trying to hide? Inside trading? Top-secret proof of extraterrestrial life? Your undercover identity as a hacker anarchist intent on causing chaos around the world?
No?
Okay, so if you’re not a criminal, why worry about online surveillance. You know the saying,
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”?
Right?
You are a criminal.
You are probably a criminal since the majority of Americans often commit potential felonies without realizing it. But even if you weren’t, you’d still have something to conceal, and you should be allowed to if you so choose. What are your thoughts on installing security cameras in a store’s changing area? What would happen if someone shared all of your financial details on Facebook?
What if a list of every single internet account you’ve ever had was made public?
You probably wouldn’t be overjoyed by those things. Even if you don’t care too much about your own privacy, think about how businesses and governments might use information against people and organizations they disagree with.
“ Knowing more about someone makes it easier to influence and control them, which is usually not in the target’s best interests.”
Examining the claim that “If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to conceal” disproves it, mainly because “Yes, you do.” Regardless of how much it matters to individuals, many fundamental social and technical processes depend on the ability to conceal information.
In a Reddit post, Edward Snowden effectively encapsulated the fundamental requirement for privacy: It is like to saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say to claim that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to conceal.
All of us have things to hide, and that’s normal.
Not just criminals are interested in keeping some information from the public sight. Like you’d feel a little uneasy if somebody came up at your house…
