this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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I'm gay and didn't want people to know when I was younger. I think everybody who says they have nothing to hide has either not thought very deeply about what they may want to keep to themselves or does not understand the principle that people should only ever know about you what you want to share with them.
Also, if being an open book is the norm, everybody with good reasons to not be completely open (like I used to be) will eventually stand out from the crowd. Keeping everybody else's private stuff private also means you can keep your own stuff private.
There's a great quote from Snowden about the right to privacy you can look up here. Excerpt from the page:
Yepppp, as a teenager I was terrified to look at trans resources partly because what if I was caught.
If you don’t have anything to hide you may not have anything to fear (except for being mistakenly identified), but nobody said you get a say in whether or not you have anything you need to hide.
Great point! That's another great angle on privacy as principle.
I am out to my family but I noticed that the nest display at my parents home would suggest LGBTQ+ related searches when I would talk to them. That would have terrified me when I was in the closet. I could only imagine what it’s like in a household that isn’t accepting
For a while Google+ recommended content that your friends liked or interacted with. I once got a Google Play app recommendation that highlighted the review a friend of mine posted on it. I was TERRIFIED that it did that by default and spend the rest of the day going through ALL settings on ALL online services that allowed connecting with friends in any way. Also, you could go to my youtube profile and could publicly see what videos I liked. A friend asked me about it and I was mortified!
Yeah, people who think they have nothing to hide enjoy maximum privilege: No one ever wanted to use knowledge about them against them. At least not for long enough that they realized telling everybody everything isn't smart.