I knew the On Privacy post by Holly Elmore, in fact, I had copied this paragraph to my Anki deck:
I now think privacy is important for maximizing self-awareness and self-transparency. The primary function of privacy is not to hide things society finds unacceptable, but to create an environment in which your own mind feels safe to tell you things. If you’re not allowing these unshareworthy thoughts and feelings a space to come out, they still affect your feelings and behavior– you just don’t know how or why. And all the while your conscious self-image is growing more alienated from the processes that actually drive you. Privacy creates the necessary conditions for self-honesty, which is a necessary prerequisite to honesty with anyone else. When you only know a cleaned-up version of yourself, you’ll only be giving others a version of your truth.
Another entry in my Anki deck is about arguments against “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”:
The rules may change: Once the invasive surveillance is in place to enforce rules that you agree with, the ruleset that is being enforced could change in ways that you don’t agree with at all – but then, it is too late to protest the surveillance.
It’s not you who determines if you have something to fear: You may consider yourself law-abidingly white as snow, and it won’t matter a bit. What does matter is whether you set off the red flags in the mostly-automated surveillance or maybe even faulty metrics and after having been investigated, you may have lost everything.
Laws must be broken for society to progress, for in hindsight, it may turn out that the criminals were the ones in the moral right. It is an absolute necessity to be able to break unjust laws for society to progress and question its own values, in order to learn from mistakes and move on as a society.
Privacy is a basic human need: Implying that only the dishonest people have need of any privacy ignores a basic property of the human psyche, and sends a creepy message of strong discomfort.
I knew the On Privacy post by Holly Elmore, in fact, I had copied this paragraph to my Anki deck:
Another entry in my Anki deck is about arguments against “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”:
The rules may change: Once the invasive surveillance is in place to enforce rules that you agree with, the ruleset that is being enforced could change in ways that you don’t agree with at all – but then, it is too late to protest the surveillance.
It’s not you who determines if you have something to fear: You may consider yourself law-abidingly white as snow, and it won’t matter a bit. What does matter is whether you set off the red flags in the mostly-automated surveillance or maybe even faulty metrics and after having been investigated, you may have lost everything.
Laws must be broken for society to progress, for in hindsight, it may turn out that the criminals were the ones in the moral right. It is an absolute necessity to be able to break unjust laws for society to progress and question its own values, in order to learn from mistakes and move on as a society.
Privacy is a basic human need: Implying that only the dishonest people have need of any privacy ignores a basic property of the human psyche, and sends a creepy message of strong discomfort.