Ever thought, “Why should I care about online privacy? I have nothing to hide.” Read this https://www.socialcooling.com/
credit: [deleted] user on Reddit.
original link: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/savz9u/i_have_nothing_to_hide_why_should_i_care_about/
u/magicmulder
The main issue isn’t that someone would be interested in you personally but that data mining may put you in categories you don’t want to be in. 99.9% correlation of your „likes“ and follows to those of terror suspects - whoops you’re a terror suspect yourself. You follow heavy metal bands and Harley Davidson? Whoops, you have a 98% likelihood of drinking and smoking, up goes your insurance rate. And so on.
u/Mayayana
Indeed. But most people here seem to have misunderstood your post. One of my favorite examples is from Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, whoo said in an interview (on youtube) that if you think you have something to hide then maybe you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. (Like maybe the Jews on Kristallnacht shouldn’t have been living in their houses?) Schmidt was later reported to have got an apartment in NYC without a doorman, to avoid gossip about his promiscuous lifestyle. :)
u/SandboxedCapybara
I always thought the like “no bathroom door,” “no curtains,” or “no free speech” arguments always fell flat when talking about privacy. Sure, as people who already care about privacy they make sense, but for people who don’t they are just such hollow arguments. I think a better argument is real life issues that people always face. The fact that things like their home address, social security number, face, email, phone number, passwords, their emails and texts, etc could be out there for anyone to see soon or may already be is almost always more concerning for people. People trust companies. People don’t trust people.
u/Striking-Implement52
Another good read: https://thenewoil.org/why.html ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
etc
Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you.
Thanks for the great share. I try to convince my loved ones of the value of even small, low effort ways to control their data slug trail. They don’t get it. Not even a little bit. And the vast majority of people won’t care until we’re all living in a black mirror episode.
Are we already living in a black mirror episode? Fuck.
While most people are horrible judges of character and when even your own family throw you under the bus… and how a stranger can even cause you much trouble, I could care less about what others may think of me in a world where every lie has become truth and every truth is a mental illness of some kind.
Been homeless most of my life, but I was different than most other homeless people. I had my fair share of problems but I made better choices than anyone else I met with the horrible plague of being homeless. I learned really quick that it doesn’t matter who or what you choose to be and it doesn’t matter how good of an attitude you have, how great or horrible you are… you’re still not important!
So yeah, all this privacy garbage is just that… “GARBAGE” and the social credit score system can be whatever it wants but I’m not changing or running in fear, nor am I to worry any longer about a dying and broken down society with some bullshit pipe dream of being a better place one day. It’s not going to ever be better and it was never good in the beginning.
I’ll die as a man of integrity before I take a knee to the enemy!
Been homeless most of my life, but I was different than most other homeless people. I had my fair share of problems but I made better choices than anyone else I met with the horrible plague of being homeless.
If that’s true, you’re exactly the kind of person who is likely to be mistreated as a result of profiling based on tracking your data. These algorithms don’t have room for exceptional cases, so you would be handled just like anyone else tagged as having been homeless. This could make it hard for you to get a home or credit or a job, among other things. It could trap a person in homelessness no matter what they do. That’s why people oppose this kind of surveillance.
In Germany there’s a private company called SCHUFA that aggregates data about people, mangles them in a proprietary (i.e. secret) way and produces a “score” indicating how creditworthy an individual is. Companies buy these scores from SCHUFA, that’s how they make a profit.
One of the data points influencing the score is a person’s address. If you live near people of whom SCHUFA thinks they’re not creditworthy, your own score will drop, too. So by simply sharing their your address, you may already suffer detrimental consequences against which they have no recourse.
This is another instance of the “being put in categories you don’t want to be in” point in favor of privacy.
We call that redlining in the US and it’s often tied up with race over here, which can quickly get a credit company into lawsuits https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
One of the issues is here in Germany we basically got a monopoly. The Schufa is so omnipresent I used to think it was lead by the government. You cannot open a bank account in Germany without giving your data to them. You almost cannot rent or buy anything on credit without their credit score. Yet they are a private profit driven company which doesn’t even tell how the score is calculated. And which is proven to not follow some laws. But noone does anything. Boggles the mind.
Insurance companies the world over already do this. If you live in a high crime area based on insurance claims your insurance will be higher. Has nothing to do with privacy.
IMHO insurance is another thing. If the insurance company has reliable (statistical) proof that I live in a neighborhood where, for instance, my property is more likely to get damaged, then it’s only right (and fair towards the other insurants) that my fees are higher.
Living in a poor neighborhood, on the other hand, does not imply that I, personally, am less likely to pay back loans.
You’re right that this is horrifying but as an American working on data broker consumer privacy issues this is hilariously quaint. The problem is so, so much worse in the states. There’s an entire industry of SCHUFAs collecting and segmenting audiences in literally hundreds of thousands of different ways, wrapping themselves in the cloak of “Consumer Reporting Agencies” and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Data brokers are the bane of our existence, the worst thing that no one is aware of in our modern world.
I’m more interested in privacy to prevent access to my data stream and PLANTING incriminating data. It’s a hell of a lot easier to frame someone when you have easy access to their devices.
TL/DR; You may have nothing to hide but you’ve got plenty to protect.
