Nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide

“Only if you’re doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don’t deserve to keep it private.”

Daniel Solove tackled this argument in 2011. As he points out, people making this argument misconstrue many aspects about what constitutes (personal) security and privacy.

“This issue isn’t about what information people want to hide but about the power and the structure of government.”

Thus, how much a government knows and monitors is indicative of that country’s governance. Our inability to know what they’re collecting, how they’re viewing this data and what they’re deducing from it should be our main concern. It is Kafkaesque as well as Orwellian, though it is because of the former that we should actually be concerned. [Read more…]