ph0b0s123 said:
This argument has been been discussed here before, but I have seen no good counter argument to it.
Oh, it's very simple -
why? Why do you need to abandon privacy? What benefit is there? Sure, maybe you have nothing to hide (a big MAYBE, I'll get to that later) but you are not exactly telling everybody you meet everything about yourself, nor is your house transparent. That's partly because you don't need to. So what is the need here? Security? Because that's going to suggest that privacy and security are zero sum. I mean, I challenge you (OK, not
you but just in general) to provide evidence for this being the case. Everything I know points at the opposite - privacy and security are not zero sum, therefore you don't need to totally sacrifice one for the other.
That's the short of it. There is more here [https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/]. You should probably head on there, I'll just ramble on here but it's not going to be as interesting or good.
But you have nothing to hide, right? Let's challenge that concept - no you have everything to hide. Every scrap of information is valuable. Information can be used in variety of way and a lot of them either unlawful, or harmful to you or both. Information is power, indeed. Hey, remember how you posted on Facebook you're going on vacation? It's easy to see and people would already know you're out of the house. That's the power of information. What else? Well, if you post photos on Twitter, especially from your phone, I can find where you live. Seriously. It's pretty trivial, there are even tools that automate it. You don't even have to take a photo of your house or street - all JPEG images have EXIF information embedded, by default, most phones and cameras put stuff in there, like time when it was taken, details about the camera (brand, technical details), name of the owner, if you supplied one). And if you used a mobile phone, it usually geotags the location where it was taken. Everybody can know where that picture is from -
everybody - its publicly available on Twitter. Just take the information of the pictures taken and you will learn a lot of stuff - where (and possibly when) you usually go and most probably where your house is.
Information is power. And yeah, there are lots of ways to use that information. Robbing the place or kidnapping come to mind. Not sure about the latter but the former definitely happens. OK, maybe the robbers don't stalk people on Twitter/Facebook and take their pick that way, but they do watch out for patterns and times when to strike - they would do a research. Why do you feel the need to make the research as simple as several clicks?
But you don't really need to worry about robbery, right? It's something that happens to other people, not you. Let them worry about it. That's the thing - they do have something to hide, in that case. But here are other things that happen to other people - pissed off people. Let's imagine Alex has a really vengeful ex so Alex moved to get away. But if the ex still sniffs out the new location, that's going to be bad. Nothing to hide? Well, no not really the case. Also, that's sadly a real scenario that has happened a lot of times - exes but also just plain mean people out to hurt you.
So far so good, that's why you need to keep information to yourself. It definitely has benefits, what is the actual drawback of doing it? None? Seems like none. So, we have Privacy positives present, negatives not present.
But whatever, let's not dwell more about you yourself not sharing information with possibly malicious people, we're talking about the government, right? Yeah, about that. Now, there is definitely the possibility of power being abused. I won't dwell on that either, but think about it,
would you blindly trust people just because they say they are trustworthy? On an unrelated note, can I have your bank account details? I won't do anything bad - trust me because you can trust me.
Anyway, there are other things that can go wrong - the government (or whoever is getting the info) plain simply mishandling your data out of stupidity. OK, that's not really probably - who is going to just leave some confidential information just lying around? That doesn't happ- [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2131236/More-secret-government-documents-left-on-train.html]...oh it actually does. Yeah, leaving files on public transport, dropping unencrypted flash drives and so on. It happens. Sometimes the information can seep out due to other not accidents, I mean, like the data being sold to third parties. Or people being cheated out of it. And so on. Are you sure your data is safe? Linkedin seems a trustworthy website, and yet last year they had their passwords stolen. 6.5 million to be precise. But OK, if you know anything about security you'd probably go "Well, they can't actually do anything with the encrypted passwords". Except they could. Yeah, the passwords are hashed but they weren't salted. Why not? I dunno - ask Linkedin. The passwords weren't easy to crack but were cracked - it just takes some more time and CPU and a botnet has pretty much infinite amounts of each - there were multiple botnets and password cracking farms working together. To make matters worse - every single password leak before that added to the ease of cracking the new passwords. Password cracking algorithms are improved with data from the leaks, so they focus the cracking techniques, since passwords are predictable and thus minimise the time needed.
Yeah, you did nothing wrong, the company...well, it did, but what it's not really responsible of is all malicious crackers now have new tools to use against you - even if you don't use Linkedin or any other compromised website, you are still vulnerable because the crackers are more armed and dangerous than before. Thanks to data that should have been kept private.
What else is there to say? Keeping things private is sort of an advantage, isn't it? What are good reasons to not do it?
But one final thought - what if you don't have anything to hide, but what if others do? Companies, businesses, acquaintances - they may have legitimate good reasons to not disclose all information. You are harming them. Yes, you read that correctly - if you think you have nothing to hide, you can harm others. The whole "nothing to hide" mentality assumes that not only you have nothing to hide but so doesn't anybody else. Which is not true. Also, the mentality assumes everybody receiving information is benign. Which is not true, either. There are lots of information one can learn about you just because others don't think it's valuable. And you can be that person if you don't realise that value. It's a lot of what social engineering hinges on - conning people out of valuable info, or otherwise stealing it, in order to attack somebody else. Usually a company, but maybe individuals, too. Fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage, theft - these are all crimes you can contribute to, if you don't see the power of information.