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The nothing to hide argument states that individuals have no reason to fear or oppose surveillance programs unless they are afraid it will uncover their own illicit activities. An individual using this argument may claim that an average person should not worry about government surveillance, as they would have "nothing to hide". [1]
An early instance of this argument was referenced by Henry James in his 1888 novel, The Reverberator :
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.
Upton Sinclair also referenced a similar argument in his book The Profits of Religion , published in 1917 :
Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends — people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the methods of the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be convincing when exploited by the yellow press. [2]
The motto "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" has been used in defense of the closed-circuit television program practiced in the United Kingdom. [3]
This argument is commonly used in discussions regarding privacy. Geoffrey Stone, a legal scholar, said that the use of the argument is "all-too-common". [3] Bruce Schneier, a data security expert and cryptographer, described it as the "most common retort against privacy advocates." [3] Colin J. Bennett, author of The Privacy Advocates, said that an advocate of privacy often "has to constantly refute" the argument. [4] Bennett explained that most people "go through their daily lives believing that surveillance processes are not directed at them, but at the miscreants and wrongdoers" and that "the dominant orientation is that mechanisms of surveillance are directed at others" despite "evidence that the monitoring of individual behavior has become routine and everyday".
An ethnographic study by Ana Viseu, Andrew Clement, and Jane Aspinal revealed that individuals with higher socioeconomic status were not as concerned by surveillance as their counterparts. [5] In another study regarding privacy-enhancing technology, [6] Viseu et al., noticed a compliancy regarding user privacy. Both studies attributed this attitude to the nothing to hide argument.
A qualitative study conducted for the government of the United Kingdom around 2003 [7] found that self-employed men initially used the "nothing to hide" argument before shifting to an argument in which they perceived surveillance to be a nuisance instead of a threat. [8]
Viseu et al., said that the argument "has been well documented in the privacy literature as a stumbling block to the development of pragmatic privacy protection strategies, and it, too, is related to the ambiguous and symbolic nature of the term ‘privacy' itself." [6] They explained that privacy is an abstract concept and people only become concerned with it once their privacy is gone. Furthermore, they compare a loss to privacy with people knowing that ozone depletion and global warming are negative developments, but that "the immediate gains of driving the car to work or putting on hairspray outweigh the often invisible losses of polluting the environment."
 | This article contains too many or overly lengthy quotations .(August 2019) |
Edward Snowden remarked "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." [9] He considered claiming nothing to hide as giving up the right of privacy which the government has to protect.
Daniel J. Solove stated in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education that he opposes the argument. He believed that a government can leak information about a person and cause damage to that person, or use information about a person to deny access to services, even if a person did not actually engage in wrongdoing. A government can cause damage to one's personal life through making errors. [3] Solove wrote "When engaged directly, the nothing-to-hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing-to-hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say."
Adam D. Moore, author of Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations, argued, "it is the view that rights are resistant to cost/benefit or consequentialist sort of arguments. Here we are rejecting the view that privacy interests are the sorts of things that can be traded for security." [10] He also stated that surveillance can disproportionately affect certain groups in society based on appearance, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion.
Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and cryptographer, expressed opposition, citing a statement widely attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, [11] "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I'll find enough to hang him," referring to how a state government can find aspects in a person's life in order to prosecute or blackmail that individual. [12] Schneier also argued that the actual choice is between "liberty versus control" instead of "security versus privacy". [12]
Emilio Mordini, philosopher and psychoanalyst, argued that the "nothing to hide" argument is inherently paradoxical. People do not need to have "something to hide" in order to hide "something". What is hidden is not necessarily relevant, claims Mordini. Instead, he argues an intimate area which can be both hidden and access-restricted is necessary since, psychologically speaking, we become individuals through the discovery that we could hide something to others. [13]
Julian Assange agreed with Jacob Appelbaum and stated that "Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes bad, it's going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth." [14]
Ignacio Cofone, a law professor, argued that the argument is mistaken in its own terms because, whenever people disclose relevant information to others, they also disclose irrelevant information. This irrelevant information has privacy costs and can lead to other harms, such as discrimination. [15]
Alex Winter, actor and filmmaker best known for his role as Bill Preston in the "Bill & Ted" films, stated in his Ted Talk that he doesn't "Accept the idea that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. Privacy serves a purpose. It’s why we have blinds on our windows and a door on our bathroom." [16]
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.
Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.
The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy. The work first appeared as a magazine article by Brin in Wired in late 1996. In 2008, security expert Bruce Schneier called the transparent society concept a "myth", claiming it ignores wide differences in the relative power of those who access information.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is an independent nonprofit research center established in 1994 to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age. Based in Washington, D.C., their mission is to "secure the fundamental right to privacy in the digital age for all people through advocacy, research, and litigation."
Biometrics are body measurements and calculations related to human characteristics. Biometric authentication is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used to identify individuals in groups that are under surveillance.
The right to privacy is an element of various legal traditions that intends to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals. Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy. On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), originally written to guarantee individual rights of everyone everywhere; while right to privacy does not appear in the document, many interpret this through Article 12, which states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by local and federal governments or governmental organizations, such as organizations like the NSA, but it may also be carried out by corporations. Depending on each nation's laws and judicial systems, the legality of and the permission required to engage in mass surveillance varies. It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes. It is also often distinguished from targeted surveillance.
A facial recognition system is a technology potentially capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces. Such a system is typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, and works by pinpointing and measuring facial features from a given image.
Privacy International (PI) is a UK-based registered charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world. First formed in 1990, registered as a non-profit company in 2002 and as a charity in 2012, PI is based in London. Its current executive director, since 2012, is Dr Gus Hosein.
Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person.
The USA PATRIOT Act was passed by the United States Congress in 2001 as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. It has ten titles, each containing numerous sections. Title II: Enhanced Surveillance Procedures granted increased powers of surveillance to various government agencies and bodies. This title has 25 sections, with one of the sections containing a sunset clause which sets an expiration date, December 31, 2005, for most of the title's provisions. This was extended twice: on December 22, 2005 the sunset clause expiration date was extended to February 3, 2006 and on February 2 of the same year it was again extended, this time to March 10.
In United States constitutional law, expectation of privacy is a legal test which is crucial in defining the scope of the applicability of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is related to, but is not the same as, a right to privacy, a much broader concept which is found in many legal systems. Overall, expectations of privacy can be subjective or objective.
Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), was a Supreme Court case holding that the installation and use of a pen register by the police to obtain information on a suspect's telephone calls was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and hence no search warrant was required. In the majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun rejected the idea that the installation and use of a pen register constitutes a violation of the suspect's reasonable expectation of privacy since the telephone numbers would be available to and recorded by the phone company anyway.
Daniel J. Solove is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is well known for his academic work on privacy and for popular books on how privacy relates with information technology.
Cyberethics is the philosophic study of ethics pertaining to computers, encompassing user behavior and what computers are programmed to do, and how this affects individuals and society. For years, various governments have enacted regulations while organizations have defined policies about cyberethics.
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that installing a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device on a vehicle and using the device to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
The Nothing to hide argument is a privacy-related argument.
Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security is a book written by Daniel J. Solove regarding the nothing to hide argument regarding privacy. It was published by Yale University Press in 2011.
The mosaic theory is a legal doctrine in American courts for considering issues of information collection, government transparency, and search and seizure, especially in cases involving invasive or large-scale data collection by government entities. The theory takes its name from mosaic tile art: while an entire picture can be seen from a mosaic's tiles at a distance, no clear picture emerges from viewing a single tile in isolation. The mosaic theory calls for a cumulative understanding of data collection by law enforcement and analyzes searches "as a collective sequence of steps rather than individual steps."
Airport privacy involves the right of personal privacy for passengers when it comes to screening procedures, surveillance, and personal data being stored at airports. This practice intertwines airport security measures and privacy specifically the advancement of security measures following the 9/11 attacks in the United States and other global terrorist attacks. Several terrorist attacks, such as 9/11, have led airports all over the world to look to the advancement of new technology such as body and baggage screening, detection dogs, facial recognition, and the use of biometrics in electronic passports. Amidst the introduction of new technology and security measures in airports and the growing rates of travelers there has been a rise of risk and concern in privacy.
