Data privacy: how to counter the "I have nothing to hide" argument?
Data privacy: how to counter the "I have nothing to hide" argument?
I know data privacy is important and I know that big corporations like Meta became powerful enough to even manipulate elections using our data.
But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they "have nothing to hide", and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.
So, why should people worry about data privacy even if they have "nothing to hide"?
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"Having nothing to hide" sounds like worrying about getting in trouble from data. But you can also get yourself and others into trouble being tracked or manipulated without consent.
A big problem is that data does not usually go away (even of you erase or delete it or forgot you shared it).
Any data you reveal can build up over time. The more data available on you, the easier it is to triangulate, to find you specifically.
And patterns happen over time. More data on your habits makes it easier to predict what you do, easier to manipulate you. Not just with advertisements or insurance rates, I mean outright scams. For example, my grandfather got conned out of $5k by a scammer who could impersonate my cousin based on the cousin's facebook, linkedin, and public records.
We also have very little insight into how much data we generate. Especially online, we can't imagine the amount of logged activity and data generated. This makes it hard to meaningfully say "I don't have a problem with how somebody uses my data" because we can't even grasp the scale of the data and how it can be used.
I also second another poster who mentioned you don't have anything to hide now, but times change. You can't go back and protect data once it's used against you! I have firsthand experience with that in Texas, USA. I worked with a company that realized in July 2022 that they should NOT record if people were pregnant in a huge database. We didn't want to have data on a pregnancies that may not work out for whatever reason in Texas because it could be used against people.