“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
This lazy, outdated crutch seems to have been subconsciously fed to a large portion of the Western world to pacify and to explain away the need for concern over the surveillance of their own lives. Not only is it an inadequate device for fulfilling its intended purpose, but it’s also completely and provably untrue.
It’s a phrase most often repeated by those who are unconcerned to take even the most basic steps to protect their own privacy. It assumes that everyone’s lives must be as insubstantial or as inconsequential as theirs presumably are, as they can’t imagine, not even for the sake of discussion, that anyone could have any valid reason to want to protect their own privacy without being some kind of criminal or falling foul of acceptable social norms.
“Just because I don’t have anything to hide doesn’t mean I have everything to show.”
This article is an attempt at a general response to this attitude and all the claims made within it. For the sake of communication in good faith, I’ll give these people the benefit of the doubt here; maybe they genuinely can’t think of a single example of casual, everyday, non-criminal people requiring varying levels of privacy. After some consideration of this, here is a short list of…
