[1505] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Tue May 24 00:19:58 2011
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 21:04:25 -0700
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----- Forwarded message from Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> -----
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 23:56:55 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
By Daniel J. Solove
May 15, 2011
When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many
people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they
declare. "Only if you're doing something wrong should you worry, and
then you don't deserve to keep it private."
The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The
data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort
against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers
to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it
is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus
making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for
security.
The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example,
the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras
in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via
closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the
government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got
nothing to fear." Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently
appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews,
and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to
profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: "I don't
mind people wanting to find out things about me, I've got nothing to
hide! Which is why I support [the government's] efforts to find
terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"
The argument is not of recent vintage. One of the characters in Henry
James's 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: "If these people had
done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he
couldn't pity them, and if they hadn't done them there was no need of
making such a rumpus about other people knowing."
I encountered the nothing-to-hide argument so frequently in news
interviews, discussions, and the like that I decided to probe the
issue. I asked the readers of my blog, Concurring Opinions, whether
there are good responses to the nothing-to-hide argument. I received
a torrent of comments:
...
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
Daniel J. Solove is a professor of law at George Washington
University. This essay is an excerpt from his new book, Nothing to
Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, published this
month by Yale University Press.
----- End forwarded message -----
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