Someone needs to always immediately follow up with questions asking people who want others to give up their privacy to give theirs up first in turn.
“Could I please get all of your phone records, browsing history, Internet account credentials, details of your friends and family, and anything else that you wouldn’t want me to have but legal for me to have so long as you provide it to me willingly? If the answer is no, then why ask me to give up my privacy when you refuse to give up yours?”
I'm not sure that's always a good start to a line of questioning? Don't get me wrong, I like the reasoning, but perhaps, "what expectations of privacy do you have for yourself or your family?".
Their answer to that might be a better starting point?
If they don't have any, then at least they would be consistent =)... You can also then discuss what kind of a society comes from that position and whether that's a good one to live in?
Alternatively another question is, "do you and your colleagues want to be stewards of this data you collect?"
What's an appropriate / reasonable punishment for failing to be good stewards? Jail time? Fines? Personal or organisational? Paying money into charities designed to act as public oversight?
Starting off combative feels nice, but just gets people's hackles up in my experience =)...
> Don't get me wrong, I like the reasoning, but perhaps, "what expectations of privacy do you have for yourself or your family?".
I feel like some people flippantly respond "none" to this, which they can afford because they are not expecting to really be compelled to give away their personal information on the spot. The response suggested by the OP would give them an opportunity to prove their position immediately.
My answer, since I love to play devil's advocate, would be, "No, you can't have any of that information, because I only trust governments and corporations with it!" Then watch them twitch a little.
That's true, but starting the question on that basis and also framing the question around it is important.
The public / audience of the debate need to be constantly reminded that these rules apply to them as well and they need to ask themselves, what am I comfortable with living under? Do I trust this administration? The current law enforcement? Forever? What could they do to me or my family if we suddenly become persona non grata?
To be honest even under this system people can reason that this is just giving the police etc powers, so even then their "privacy" isn't really at risk.
They aren't necessarily thinking that:
- data can be leaked
- data could be sold
- you can get malicious officers
- the data can be used for other purposes
- etc
These are the other parts of the conversation that need to also be thought about because otherwise this is just another security blanket.
They’re probably not the best people to be asking that question anyway. Police, politicians, and especially anybody who works in a national security role, are all people who have already accepted living with seriously diminished privacy in order to do their jobs. It’s also not terribly surprising the journalists are mostly rather delinquent when it comes to privacy controversies, as privacy gets in the way of a journalist doing their job as often as it does a police officer.
This is a really good point and I'm not sure how to really tackle it other than ask if they're also comfortable with the same being true for their families as well as themselves?
There were cases where lack of privacy for public figures family members have caused issues[0][1]. I don't want to focus on that specific story, it's just an example.
This might be a case where people are happy about that information being public? Or maybe they have a more nuanced take? For example, report that it happened, but don't print their name / picture? (for example both articles below did name, but only nytimes seems to have also done picture)
Where you draw the lines on this stuff can be really important.
Your phrasing is definitely a better initial starting point. I do think that my phrasing has its place if a non-answer is given after the second or third time.
Your follow-up questions are great too.
This sort of dialog / FAQ for “what do you have to hide” needs to be available somewhere online with a catchy URI e.g. https://privacymatters.org (I don’t know if this is real just an example).
Definitely agree that your stronger take is needed if people say none.
But that's why in my opinion, a question about what society people are looking to live in is important. We can start to draw out what people are and aren't comfortable with.
Personally I think that in addition to websites, more media needs to be available for the public to discuss this topic more and get a feel for it.
EG: Mr Robot raised some questions about whether the hacking and casual discovery of personal information they were showing was realistic.
Perhaps "Man in the High Castle", I've not seen it, so not sure if it covers the notion of the nation state turning hostile and then leveraging collected information to attack specific citizens, but something along those lines.
Also things like the munk debates to foster discussion.
In my experience media does a much better job of getting people to empathise with different circumstances which would get them really thinking what these things might mean for them.
Quote of my coworker about why he doesn’t want to vote yes on a referendum to overturn a law that expands our intelligence agencies rights for surveillance with oversight from a single judge and no transparency and accountability: „As long as they catch at least one of these assholes, I don‘t care about me being surveilled. You will understand this when you become a father.“
This opened my eyes most people have an irrational fear and think that these capabilities won‘t be abused. At the same time our state abused their surveillance capabilities during the cold war and gathered data on almost a million people. But people seem to have forgotten already.
I‘m talking about Switzerland if you are wondering what which of authoritarian regime I‘m talking about.
> You will understand this when you become a father
Such a BS attitude. For one, it's self serving and selfish. It serves only to comfort the parent and has no consideration for the life their child will be handed when they become adults. Heck, even children and teenagers will suffer from freedom sapped by people who offload their agency to the government time and time again in exchange for an insulated "life". How can you make mistakes and learn if everything is under the eyeball of an authority who has the freedom to do as they please as long as it's in the name of public safety.
Life entirely without risk and danger, at all costs, is not a life at all, and that's what you want to hand your daughters and sons?
When you blindly let this legislation through because the first page of the draft reassures you it will get "assholes" off the streets you also tend to become entirely passive about the rest of the legislation. All sorts of side effects and detriments to society can be ushered in if you don't question big changes like this.
People with the mentality of "at all costs we must be safe" are doing damage that is irreparable. We must accept that life is implicitly hazardous at times.
I recognize my objection is futile, it's impossible to argue any case in the face of "think of the children". Genes want to survive and project themselves into the future, it's hard wired into us. The more technology and organization we have the more we are going to use it to abstract ourselves the human monument rather than mere organisms. We really can't help ourselves.
This is possibly one of the most defining and interesting times to be alive. We get to witness the beginning of a madness, what happens when life is able to achieve its goal only to find out it's a meaningless dead end.
You can get them thinking by making them realize that more than one of the assholes they are afraid of will be hired there and will have access to their and their kids most private data.
It’s astounding how many ordinary regular humans want a father or a big brother to take the responsibility of looking after them and keeping them safe.
The world is a scary place. The problem is that it doesn’t become less so by giving up your privacy, it becomes more so.
The world bought the idea that privacy and security are at odds, and that by giving up one, you gain the other. It’s the biggest lie of our generation.
I hope I don’t live to see the chickens coming home to roost. It’s happening in China and Russia, and what happened to Assange is a preview of what will eventually happen in the USA.
Eventually? You mean already is happening. It has started. But that only as a side note.
The "problem" is, that there is not one universal "freedom". Freedom is many concepts packaged into one single word.
Coming from Germany, I still remember the division by the Iron Curtain. Having lived on the western side few miles from the border and having talked to a lot of former GDR people (my father fled with his parents before the wall was build when he was still a little kid) during the years I came to understand two totally different forms of "freedom" at play in the different regimes:
A lot of people in the east got away with critizizing their bosses and sometimes even becoming physical. Up to a certain point they even got away with being somewhat critical to the system and the problems within the system.
In the west people got away with critizising the state quite well, while it became problematic to critique your bosses at your workplace. I know a lot of people in my father's generation who got fired for pointing out flaws in their workplace.
We were able to travel to a lot of places (once we were well off enough to afford it). While my parents still struggled to pay for me being able to attend sport clubs.
My while my SO's parents (she was born few years before the wall fell in the eastern part of Germany) were only ever able to travel to the east German coast, other eastern countries like Slowakia or what is now the Czech Republik, Romania or Bulgaria, Russia or Cuba (and they were by far less well off than my western German parents).
I don't imply one system was better, one was worse. Well yes I do - the GDR was worse. But what I wanted to show is, that there are different kind of "freedoms" and that is just one example. Every form of freddom comes with inherent trade-offs.
Because of preferences, personal values and said trade-offs other people tend to prefere different kinds of freedoms (while maybe not grasping that their choices impact others - like a tragedy of the commons thing). They seem to have a different hierarchy of what is important to them - and decide based on that. Be it in Germany, the US or as OP pointed out in Switzerland.
I was in China for a friend's wedding and his fiance's family was adding another floor to their house. I asked what kind of permission they needed. They said they didn't need anything. They just went ahead and did it.
Contrast that to the US and, depending on the place, you could spend months arranging to get the proper paperwork and inspections to be able to do something like that.
So while the Chinese person may not have the freedom to strongly criticize their government, in this case they did have more freedom to make an individual improvement to the quality of their immediate life.
I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean? In a society you're never truly free. There's always some form of constraint. You could go live as a hermit and be free but then you're constrained by the physical limitations of the environment.
While walking to work (pre-covid) I'd see homeless people and wonder "Are they freer than me?" They can wake up and do whatever they want for the day. I'm the one that has to stick to a fairly regular schedule.
> I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean?
Someone smarter than me once wrote “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
If you can point out that someone in authority is wrong, without fear of death or persecution, then you have freedom and from that germ everything else can be reformed eventually.
Dictators know this and it's why they don't let people laugh at them even when they clearly look stupid.
I can’t agree with this. Life is hard but isn’t scary. I’m far more concerned about losing my home to a natural disaster than terrorism. Fear is the media’s new currency.
There’s nothing to be scared of, except maybe a dystopian future where you can be jailed or killed for your beliefs.
There is a nice counter-balance to the "I've got nothing to hide" idiom, which is "I've got nothing to hide, but I've got nothing to share".
Changing the focus from "hiding", which insinuates underhandedness or immorality, to "sharing" - often allows the conversation to extend to "What would you be comfortable sharing with (the government | the police | your neighbors) etc.
In my experience, this angle helps people grasp more quickly that they'd be uncomfortable sharing many things with most people.
>I‘m talking about Switzerland if you are wondering what which of authoritarian regime I‘m talking about
That's part of the the problem. Hundreds of years of (relative to everyone else) peace and stable not too abusive government makes people complacent.
You won't hear many people from places that had repressive governments within their or their parents' lifetimes saying "but if it catches one terrorist."
I don‘t care about me being surveilled. You will understand this when you become a father
He's OK with random strangers surveilling his children then? Because no child molesters have ever been employed by the public sector, of course. And no government has ever leaked data onto the dark web. Honestly, there should be a parenting license people need to pass with exams.
> "As long as they catch at least one of these assholes, I don‘t care about me being surveilled. You will understand this when you become a father"
I would probably make enemies very quickly as I would be sorely tempted to respond "So you want your children to live in a police state? God you are a terrible father."
Well I have done this in the past to people I know who say they have "nothing to hide" and the answer they give is super simple - "I'm happy to provide all of the above and more to law enforcement agencies at any point. I don't have any problem with authority and I don't understand why you do.".
You can then explain that the data does get misused, but they always just say that it won't happen to them or if they do get in a hairy situation they will always explain themselves since after all they have nothing to hide.
The thing people don't realize about the 'nothing to hide' mantra is that it only makes sense if someone looks at your whole life. If you really did have someone examining everything you ever did, watching a playback of your entire life, through your eyes - and this was the only form that anyone would get your data in, by watching everything - then yeah, you probably wouldn't need to hide anything. That person would see everything you do, and understand you pretty well by the end of it. All the things you did, even the seemingly weird things, would make sense in context. They'd sympathize with you.
But that isn't what happens. What does happen is huge amounts of data are recorded, but only little pieces are looked at at a time. And suddenly you do have something to hide, because the people looking at the data on you won't have the full story, and will therefore jump to conclusions based on what they have - and because you won't know when and where this is happening, and what specifically they're looking at, you won't be able to set them straight. Suddenly your every action has to look innocent on its own, you can't do anything that is justifiable given prior events or knowledge. Your wife has been treating you like shit for months, and finally you snap and yell at her? If they only see the end of it then you look like the bad guy. You're researching bombs because you're interested in the historical development of technology, including explosive technology? Tough shit, you don't get to explain that, to them it will just look like you're a big bad terrorist wanting to blow up the government.
You might say that they will have all your information so they can fact-check. This is wrong, they have neither the incentive or the time to trawl through your whole life working out your motivations for everything. It's easiest to just jump to conclusions. And employers will look at this and make judgments on you - without you having any idea what they're seeing and what they're concluding from it.
In public, people carefully monitor their behavior so they appear normal to anyone who only sees them for a second. They're only willing to show their weirder sides to people who know them, who won't make big judgments on them based on minor quirks. With total surveillance, everyone will be in public, all the time.
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I wonder how much a version of the fundamental attribution error is responsible for "nothing to hide" kind of thinking.
Also adding to the FAE angle, we have to consider what a potentially "bad" action looks like not just outside of context, but in aggregate, because in these systems you're probably looking for outliers, unusual sentiment, not just key terms.
This has a chilling effect on any extra-normal behavior.
If it was implicit that context leading up to and afterwards were required to interpret the outlier, one would see it's probably not an outlier after all, but that requires a lot of people's time and potentially your involvement.
Even if that context could be supplied with tons of surveillance and people/AI, I'd wager people would rather not be hauled in front of the internet police to explain every non-obvious, out-of-the-ordinary thing they directly or indirectly associated with.
Ask them if they'd also be fine with hackers potentially leaking
all their account data to the public.
There are enough real-life examples, like the Equifax debacle or
that "dating" site where multiple people committed suicide when
their online identities got leaked.
The only way to guarantee personal data cannot be abused by
anyone, authority or not, is when those data don't exist at all.
We know that governments are too incompetent to follow best
practices in security, we know that this kind of power gets
abused with barely any limits because there's no
accountability(e.g. when a prominent German singer did a concert
police officers made 83 lookups of her data in the police
database just in that single night. Nothing ever came out of
it even though the police had to admit those numbers aren't
possible without abuse).
I suspect that to a great degree, people who say they have nothing to hid do have something to hide, but are trying to bluster their way out of closer scrutiny. The Ashley Madison thing is an excellent example, if anyone would commit suicide over having details of that nature leaked they certainly wouldn't admit to having anything of the sort on their conscience when discussing the matter with friends or family.
It's a bit of a tricky situation because as has been noted upthread, the best practical way to maintain privacy is to simulate the ambient data noise. So in a sense, loudly proclaiming one has nothing to hide is the best strategy for keeping one's own privacy secure, but at the expense of everyone else's.
I don't get into these conversations much, but if I do perhaps I should try out the response: "I don't have anything to hide either, but I know a lot of my fellow citizens value their privacy. So I'm willing to advocate for it even though I know it will lead to more scrutiny on myself. Anyone who's afraid of that extra scrutiny is suspect! What are you really hiding!?"
The best retort is "You don't get to decide that - your persecutor does and you have no way of knowing what their twisted ideology will find 'wrong' with your past actions."
To which again, the answer is "I trust the authority and I trust the system". I've heard this too many times, ultimately the conversation ends with "but I trust the police and I trust the courts, so I really don't care"
if they do get in a hairy situation they will always explain themselves since after all they have nothing to hide
Every middle class person thinks that but what they don't understand is that cops spend their entire lives being lied to, every day, nearly everyone they speak to who isn't a fellow cop is lying to them. So that you are lying is their default position. They're going to go with whatever it says on their screen or whatever another cop told them, 100% of the time.
Well the example I like to give is that pre WW2 many countries gathered completely normal census data, but of course during WW2 Nazis used it to find out exactly where Jews lived. So the data was collected with perfectly good intentions and it was then used to kill people.
To which of course all I hear is
"Well yes, but that's not going to happen to the UK, so I don't think it's important"
On the one hand antisemitism is definitely a massive, deep issue in the Labour party. On the other hand there's no way Jews could be systematically targeted in the future.
You don't have a symmetrical relationship with the government. Do you ask the IRS every year "can you please send me 25% of all the money you collected this year? If not, why ask me to give up mine?"
I'm in favour of strong privacy protections, but this argument isn't one I find convincing.
Why can I not be pissed off at my government abusing my data? We should also be pissed off at the insanely wasteful spending that the federal government does as well.
You can resent paying tax, and argue that you should pay less tax or that your tax money should be spent more effectively. But arguing that the government has no right to extract taxation is...fringe, let's say.
In the same way, arguing that the government has absolutely no right to information you would prefer to keep private is not compelling. Better to demand limitations on what data can collect and what it can do with that data.
The problem is that too many people have a world view wherein government can do no wrong or never does enough wrong to matter. That world view (or massive amounts of cognitive dissonance) is a necessary prerequisite for being willing to tolerate this kind of government invasion or privacy.
Making these people uncomfortable with giving the government all that info will just move them from the naive camp to the cognitive dissonance camp. Other than actually experiencing significant government abuse I don't think anything will change these people's minds. Political ideology is like a religion these days.
Or, if they're of the type that are actually ok with that, then "please install this webcam next to your toilet" usually works. Followed by "what do you have to hide? Surely you're not committing CRIMES in there, are you??"
What people often forget is that often it's not Big Brother you need to be wary of but Little Brother.
That is, low level bureaucrats that work for you local council, your local police force or at your local hospital or telecoms company. People who might actually know you or that you might meet socially. A friend of a friend maybe.
These are the people being given access to all your private secrets...
The issue is there is a non-trivial portion of even industry insiders who buy into the "nothing to hide" rhetoric. I can't count the number of team outings I've had these conversations and get stonewalled on "Well, just be a Luddite then." I figured it's some sort of Upton Sinclairism, but most of them weren't even relying on it for a paycheck, and saw someone complaining about (for example) someone being nervous about the use of voice assistants like Google Home, Siri, Cortana, or Alexa around them, and wishing to have those devices turned off burdensome, or unreasonable even if broached politely.
Do not seem to have that issue with people historically targeted by governments though.
“Could I please get all of your phone records, browsing history, Internet account credentials, details of your friends and family, and anything else that you wouldn’t want me to have but legal for me to have so long as you provide it to me willingly? If the answer is no, then why ask me to give up my privacy when you refuse to give up yours?”