http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 15, 2011
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
By Daniel J. Solove
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:
My response is "So do you have curtains?" or "Can I see your credit-card
bills for the last year?"
So my response to the "If you have nothing to hide ... " argument is
simply, "I don't need to justify my position. You need to justify yours. Come
back with a warrant."
I don't have anything to hide. But I don't have anything I feel like
showing you, either.
If you have nothing to hide, then you don't have a life.
Show me yours and I'll show you mine.
It's not about having anything to hide, it's about things not being
anyone else's business.
Bottom line, Joe Stalin would [have] loved it. Why should anyone have to
say more?
On the surface, it seems easy to dismiss the nothing-to-hide argument.
Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn declared, "Everyone is guilty of something or has something to
conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is." Likewise,
in Friedrich DC