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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
I wonder how much a version of the fundamental attribution error is responsible for "nothing to hide" kind of thinking.