In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

A bit dated and lengthy, but nevertheless a great read.

  • tyler@programming.dev
    3·
    1 day ago

    If it’s the government doing it, it’s one thing, but this completely avoids any discussion of private companies collecting every single piece of data they possibly can on you to sell.

    Data collection falls under a different category of privacy issues, than government surveillance, as he was pointing out in his article, so conflating them is unhelpful.

    It doesn’t though, since the government can now just purchase that data. It’s no longer considered a search since a private company did it of their own accord, at least in the U.S.

    So the government is just bypassing all these protections and just buying the data outright.

    And the lawyers that somehow lost the argument on whether spam mail harms people is astounding. “I could have gotten a letter telling me I had an inheritance, but I get so much spam mail it could have gotten lost. It’s impossible to know the extent of the harms I’ve endured due to the amount my data has been sold.”

    Not sure what you’re on about here, wasn’t mentioned there at all.

    A similar problem surfaces in another case, Smith v. Chase Manhattan
Bank.
99 A group of plaintiffs sued Chase Manhattan Bank for selling
customer information to third parties in violation of its privacy policy,
which stated that the information would remain confidential. The court
held that even presuming these allegations were true, the plaintiffs could
not prove any actual injury:
[T]he “harm” at the heart of this purported class action, is that class members
were merely offered products and services which they were free to decline.
This does not qualify as actual harm.
The complaint does not allege any single instance where a named plaintiff or
any class member suffered any actual harm due to the receipt of an unwanted
telephone solicitation or a piece of junk mail.100

    From the paper.