What is a good comeback or argument towards people who say “But I have nothing to hide” when you try to information them that privacy is important?
What is a good comeback or argument towards people who say “But I have nothing to hide” when you try to information them that privacy is important?
People generally agree that you should have privacy from your neighbors, yes. Not having that would have real consequences for people. Like it could affect what people think of you etc.
But often the discussion is about if the government should be able to snoop on your web traffic or if large corporations should be allowed to gather data about you so they can customize advertising.
It is a logically consistent position to be okay with Google accessing your phone’s data but not wanting your neighbor to have such access. No one is advocating the latter, so I think we need to sharpen our arguments. Otherwise we’re just making a strawman argument.
I both agree and disagree. I agree that people are often unswayed by pro-privacy arguments. I disagree that it is the fault of the arguments themselves. The problem is that people are uneducated regarding the repercussions of abdicating their privacy to a government or corporation. They don’t want their neighbors to be able to see in to their bedroom, but they find no issue with allowing Google (or any data-miner/government) to create complex and nuanced profiles of their habits, tastes and psychological tendencies that is full of identity rich data. It’s tantamount to handing over your fingerprints “because why not.”
Man’s reach has excedded his grasp with technology, and most of us in the general public have no real understanding of how it all works. Perhaps a bit like the north American Natives not understanding the significance of selling their land to european settlers until it was to late.
From an informed perspective, it isn’t logically consistent to be ok with Google having unfettered access to your phone’s data but not so with your neighbor. One is a person, someone you may even have real reason to trust, and the other is a profit driven corporation that has repeatedly shown that it will violate civil rights in their pursuit of dominance in their field. People have lost their ability to value the right to privacy because the corporations have conditioned them to do so. The book 1984 has many good depictions of what it is like to symbolically “live a life with no curtains,” and it’s a hellscape. However I think people are just not informed or educated enough in the significance of privacy to see this clearly in our current setting. That’s not really something we can address in the short span of a conversation. It’s just beginning to dawn on some of my family members after almost a decade of me sharing info with them, and usually it comes after they see some piece of media that dramatizes the invasion of digital privacy on TV. Sad that our world view is so dependant on media like that.