alt Hacker News> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
Replies
That's all as may be, and I agree those are relevant points, but the overarching principle, IMNSHO, is that "my business is my business and not anyone else's." Full stop.
This is a great list. I would add:
- Megacorporations cozying up to government in exchange for access to this information, for a competitive advantage, targeted advertising, etc. Lawmakers will bend over backward for corporations if they are promised "job creation" in their districts, or it could be lobbying or even straight-up bribery. We have a sitting supreme court member who openly takes bribes and he's suffered no consequences for it. It's not hard to imagine data the government collected in a giant dragnet being shared with generous campaign contributors.
- Laws changing to target an out-group. Remember how the government was keenly interested in people's period-tracking apps so they could imprison people who they suspected had an abortion? It doesn't matter whether your private data could incriminate you now, it's dangerous if it could incriminate you from any future government that is hostile to you.