I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel Solove. Highly recommended.

Full paper here.

"Because privacy involves protecting against a plurality of different harms or problems, the value of privacy is different depending upon which particular harm or problem is being protected. Not all privacy problems are equal; some are more harmful than others. Therefore, we cannot ascribe an abstract value to privacy. Its value will differ substantially depending upon the problem or harm we are safeguarding against. Thus, to understand privacy, we must conceptualize it and its value more pluralisically. Privacy is a set of protections against a related set of problems. These problems are not all related in the same way, but they resemble each other. There is a social value in protecting against each problem, and that value differs depending on the nature of each problem...

...the problem with the nothing to hide argument is with its underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. Agreeing with this assumption concedes far too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide...

The deeper problem with the "nothing to hide" argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy. But understanding privacy as a plurality of related problems demonstrates that concealment of bad things is just one among many problems caused by government programs such as the NSA surveillance and data mining...

Far too often, discussions of the NSA surveillance and data mining define the problem soley in terms of surveillance... the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. The NSA programs are problematic even if no information people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial the problem is not inhibited behaviour but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerabilitycreated by the court system's use of personal data and its exclusion of the protaganist from having any knowledge or participation in the process. The harms consist of those created by bureaucracies - indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and a lack of transparency and accountability...

In many instances, privacy is threatened not by singular egregious acts but by a slow series of relatively minor acts, which gradually begin to add up. In this way, privacy problems resemble certain environmental harms which occur over time...

The "noting to hide" argument...represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised in government surveillance and data mining programs. When engaged with directly, the "nothing to hide" argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the "nothing to hide" argument, in the end has nothing to say."

I make the same argument in chapters 5 and 6 of my book but not nearly so eloquently.