I've Got Nothing To Hide
I really don't understand this attitude toward privacy. When I talk to people about how it's not a good idea to publish their personal lifes on platforms like Facebook, about how they are the gateway for governments, MI6, the NSA and CIA to their personal information, I usually am treated to a shrug and the statement in this post's title.
source: The Blue Diamond Gallery
"If you've done nothing wrong or illegal, why should you care that the government has access to your personal data?" I really can not understand where this idea came from. Why on earth would you allow anyone to know your every thought on every subject? The right to privacy is intimately linked to the right of freedom of speech and freedom of choice, as well as experimenting with new ideas. Say you are born into a strict religious family, but growing up you have conversations with other people, and you come to the conclusion that you do not believe in you parent's God anymore. I wager that you'd want to choose your own moment and conditions under which to tell your parents, if you want to tell them at all.
Imagine the extreme circumstance, often studied in science fiction, of mind-reading; we can all read each others minds... Would you feel comfortable with that? Civilized people would want to think their thoughts over before expressing them to the world. If I mindlessly uttered every thought I had about certain people on certain moments, I'd have no friends or job left; no one is perfect and we all occasionally have the ugliest thoughts even about the ones we love most.
And governments can and do change. You might not have problems with your current government having access to your data, but what if next year we vote in a new Adolf Hitler? Now he knows everything about you and about all your friends. If he wants to find you, well... best get rid of that mobile fast. All significant social change comes about by violating established rules and laws. It were terrorists against the monarchy that started the revolution towards democracy. Now we treat Assange as a terrorist, and Snowden and Manning... Elon Musk on the other hand is one of our heroes and regarded widely as a great thinker.
This video came as a surprise to me, as Musk apparently doesn't seem to understand the importance of privacy, and gives the same arguments I hear every day: the average citizen has nothing of importance to hide... Maybe it's because he had some whiskey and weed in the interview with Joe Rogan, but still it's mind-boggling to me that someone as intelligent as Musk says such silly things about one of our basic human rights. Judge for yourself:
Why privacy matters and Elon Musk is wrong
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I have to say that i agree with Elon to a degree. Privacy matters only as far as you decide it matters.
If you dont want people to know your every thought on every subject, then dont write it, dont use social media, watch what you share on social media.
Your right to privacy stops when you decide to share information about yourself publicly.
The facebook thing is something completely different. They sold your information without clear consent and even if you opted to be private you could not have been.
Thats a whole other ballpark.
I for one dont care about privacy in terms of what i do on social media, because if i wanted to keep stuff i share private i wouldnt have shared it in the first place.
That's a good point indeed. But it's so much more. It's not just what you choose to share; it's your clicking habits, your shopping patterns, your gps data... They create a digital "lordbutterfy" avatar and use it to manipulate the real lordbutterfy. Have you ever seen a time-lapse clip of a busy intersection where you see streams of pedestrians cross the street and streams of cars driving and then stopping at the intersection? It's those patters, those movements, these flows that they're interested in too, and your placement in that flow.
Democracy is founded on the premise that those in power are transparent, open and honest, and regular people have a right to privacy; it's the other way around now, and that's not a small problem, that's a disaster. Read @clayboyn's latest post and if you've never heard it, listen to the JFK speech he references. A free and open society, which we pretend to be, can only be free and open if we know everything about our governments and their corporate henchmen, and they know only what they need to know about us. "I have nothing to hide" or "my information isn't interesting enough to care about" just won't do.
Brainwash
That is where it's from..
Posted using Partiko Android
Modern society is a permanent brain-laundry indeed...
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