Nothing To Hide

A far  better explanation comes from James Duane, a professor at the Regent University School of Law, former criminal defense attorney, and Fifth Amendment expert. His "Don't Talk To Police" video has gone viral. He quotes the Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, a prosecutor's prosecutor, who said that the right to silence is there to protect the innocent. The good professor [ Duane ] is also in favour of Jury Nullification.

From http://familyrights.us/bin/white_papers-articles/nothing_to_hide.pdf

 

I Have Nothing To Hide!
QUOTE
The argument that no privacy problem exists if a person has nothing to hide is frequently made in connection with many privacy issues. When the government engages in surveillance, many people believe that there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it...............

The "nothing to hide" argument and its variants are quite prevalent in popular discourse about privacy. Data security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates.".... In popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument’s superficial incantations can readily be refuted. But when the argument is made in its strongest form, it is far more formidable.

 

DANIEL J. SOLOVE*

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................745

II. THE "NOTHING TO HIDE" ARGUMENT................................................................748

III. CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY..............................................................................754

A. A Pluralistic Conception of Privacy........................................................754

B. The Social Value of Privacy.....................................................................760

IV. THE PROBLEM WITH THE "NOTHING TO HIDE" ARGUMENT.................................764

A. Understanding the Many Dimensions of Privacy.....................................764

B. Understanding Structural Problems........................................................768

V. CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................772

I. INTRODUCTION

Since the September 11 attacks, the government has been engaging in extensive surveillance and data mining. Regarding surveillance, in December 2005, the New York Times revealed that after September 11, the Bush Administration secretly authorized the National Security Administration (NSA) to engage in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens’ telephone calls.1 As for data mining, which involves analyzing personal data for patterns of suspicious behavior, the government has begun numerous programs. In 2002, the media revealed that the Department of Defense was constructing a data mining project, called "Total Information Awareness" (TIA), under the leadership of Admiral John Poindexter.2 The vision for TIA was to gather a variety of information about people, including financial, educational, health, and other data. The information would then be analyzed for suspicious behavior patterns. According to Poindexter: "The only way to detect . . . terrorists is to look for patterns of activity that are based on observations from past terrorist attacks as well as estimates about how terrorists will adapt to our measures to avoid detection."3 When the program came to light, a public outcry erupted, and the U.S. Senate subsequently voted to deny the program funding, ultimately leading to its demise.4 Nevertheless, many components of TIA continue on in various government agencies, though in a less systematic and more clandestine fashion.5

In May 2006, USA Today broke the story that the NSA had obtained customer records from several major phone companies and was analyzing them to identify potential terrorists.6 The telephone call database is reported to be the "largest database ever assembled in the world."7 In June 2006, the New York Times stated that the U.S. government had been accessing bank records from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions (SWIFT), which handles financial transactions for thousands of banks around the world.8 Many people responded with outrage at these announcements, but many others did not perceive much of a problem. The reason for their lack of concern, they explained, was because: "I’ve got nothing to hide."9

The argument that no privacy problem exists if a person has nothing to hide is frequently made in connection with many privacy issues. When the government engages in surveillance, many people believe that there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. Thus, if an individual engages only in legal activity, she has nothing to worry about. When it comes to the government collecting and analyzing personal information, many people contend that a privacy harm exists only if skeletons in the closet are revealed. For example, suppose the government examines one’s telephone records and finds out that a person made calls to her parents, a friend in Canada, a video store, and a pizza delivery place. "So what?," that person might say. "I’m not embarrassed or humiliated by this information. If anybody asks me, I’ll gladly tell them where I shop. I have nothing to hide."

The "nothing to hide" argument and its variants are quite prevalent in popular discourse about privacy. Data security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates."10 Legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as "all-too-common refrain."11 The nothing to hide argument is one of the primary arguments made when balancing privacy against security. In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal to trivial, thus making the balance against security concerns a foreordained victory for security. Sometimes the nothing to hide argument is posed as a question: "If you have nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?" Others ask: "If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide?"

In this essay, I will explore the nothing to hide argument and its variants in more depth. Grappling with the nothing to hide argument is important, because the argument reflects the sentiments of a wide percentage of the population. In popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument’s superficial incantations can readily be refuted. But when the argument is made in its strongest form, it is far more formidable.

In order to respond to the nothing to hide argument, it is imperative that we have a theory about what privacy is and why it is valuable. At its core, the nothing to hide argument emerges from a conception of privacy and its value. What exactly is "privacy"? How valuable is privacy and how do we assess its value? How do we weigh privacy against countervailing values? These questions have long plagued those seeking to develop a theory of privacy and justifications for its legal protection.

This essay begins in Part II by discussing the nothing to hide argument. First, I introduce the argument as it often exists in popular discourse and examine frequent ways of responding to the argument. Second, I present the argument in what I believe to be its strongest form. In Part III, I briefly discuss my work thus far on conceptualizing privacy. I explain why existing theories of privacy have been unsatisfactory, have led to confusion, and have impeded the development of effective legal and policy responses to privacy problems. In Part IV, I argue that the nothing to hide argument—even in its strongest form—stems from certain faulty assumptions about privacy and its value. The problem, in short, is not with finding an answer to the question: "If you’ve got nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?" The problem is in the very question itself.

II. THE "NOTHING TO HIDE" ARGUMENT

When discussing whether government surveillance and data mining pose a threat to privacy, many people respond that they have nothing to hide. This argument permeates the popular discourse about privacy and security issues. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed circuit television.12 In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear."13 In the United States, one anonymous individual from the Department of Justice comments: "If [government officials] need to read my e-mails . . . so be it. I have nothing to hide. Do you?"14 One blogger, in reference to profiling people for national security purposes, declares: "Go ahead and profile me, I have nothing to hide."15 Another blogger proclaims: "So I don’t mind people wanting to find out things about me, I’ve got nothing to hide! Which is why I support President Bush’s efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"16 Variations of nothing to hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. Some examples include:

• I don’t have anything to hide from the government. I don’t think I had that much hidden from the government in the first place. I don’t think they care if I talk about my ornery neighbor.17

• Do I care if the FBI monitors my phone calls? I have nothing to hide. Neither does 99.99 percent of the population. If the wiretapping stops one of these Sept. 11 incidents, thousands of lives are saved.18

• Like I said, I have nothing to hide. The majority of the American people have nothing to hide. And those that have something to hide should be found out, and get what they have coming to them.19

The argument is not only of recent vintage. For example, one of the characters in Henry James’s 1888 novel, The Reverberator, muses: "[I]f these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing."20

I encountered the nothing to hide argument so frequently in news interviews, discussions, and the like, that I decided to blog about the issue. I asked the readers of my blog, Concurring Opinions, whether there are good responses to the nothing to hide argument.21 I received a torrent of comments to my post:

• My response is "So do you have curtains?" or "Can I see your credit card bills for the last year?"22

• So my response to the "If you have nothing to hide . . ." argument is simply, "I don’t need to justify my position. You need to justify yours. Come back with a warrant."23

• I don’t have anything to hide. But I don’t have anything I feel like showing you, either.24

• If you have nothing to hide, then you don’t have a life.25

• Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.26

• It’s not about having anything to hide, it’s about things not being anyone else’s business.27

• Bottom line, Joe Stalin would [have] loved it. Why should anyone have to say more?28

Most replies to the nothing to hide argument quickly respond with a witty retort. Indeed, on the surface it seems easy to dismiss the nothing to hide argument. Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared, "Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is."29 Likewise, in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "‘An altogether minor matter,’ the prosecutor replied . . . . ‘A crime can always be found.’"30 One can usually think of something compelling that even the most open person would want to hide. As one comment to my blog post noted: "If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph—so I can show it to your neighbors?"31 Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues:

There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes’ questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters.32

Such responses only attack the nothing to hide argument in its most extreme form, which is not particularly strong. As merely a one-line utterance about a particular person’s preference, the nothing to hide argument is not very compelling. But stated in a more sophisticated manner, the argument is more challenging. First, it must be broadened beyond the particular person making it. When phrased as an individual preference, the nothing to hide argument is hard to refute because it is difficult to quarrel with one particular person’s preferences. As one commenter aptly notes:

By saying "I have nothing to hide," you are saying that it’s OK for the government to infringe on the rights of potentially millions of your fellow Americans, possibly ruining their lives in the process. To me, the "I have nothing to hide" argument basically equates to "I don’t care what happens, so long as it doesn’t happen to me."33

In its more compelling variants, the nothing to hide argument can be made in a more general manner. Instead of contending that "I’ve got nothing to hide," the argument can be recast as positing that all law-abiding citizens should have nothing to hide. Only if people desire to conceal unlawful activity should they be concerned, but according to the nothing to hide argument, people engaged in illegal conduct have no legitimate claim to maintaining the privacy of such activities.

In a related argument, Judge Richard Posner contends: "[W]hen people today decry lack of privacy, what they want, I think, is mainly something quite different from seclusion: they want more power to conceal information about themselves that others might use to their disadvantage."34 Privacy involves a person’s "right to conceal discreditable facts about himself."35 In other words, privacy is likely to be invoked when there is something to hide and that something consists of negative information about a person. Posner asserts that the law should not protect people in concealing discreditable information. "The economist," he argues, "sees a parallel to the efforts of sellers to conceal defects in their products."36

Of course, one might object, there is nondiscreditable information about people that they nevertheless want to conceal because they find it embarrassing or just do not want others to know about. In a less extreme form, the nothing to hide argument does not refer to all personal information, but only to that subset of personal information that is likely to be involved in government surveillance. When people respond to NSA surveillance and data mining that they have nothing to hide, the more sophisticated way of understanding their argument should be as applying to the particular pieces of information that are gathered in the NSA programs. Information about what phone numbers people dial and even what they say in many conversations is often not likely to be embarrassing or discreditable to a law-abiding citizen. Retorts to the nothing to hide argument about exposing people’s naked bodies to the world or revealing their deepest secrets to their friends are only relevant if there is a likelihood that such programs will actually result in these kinds of disclosures. This type of information is not likely to be captured in the government surveillance. Even if it were, many people might rationally assume that the information will be exposed only to a few law enforcement officials, and perhaps not even seen by human eyes. Computers might store the data and analyze it for patterns, but no person might have any contact with the data. As Posner argues:

The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.37

There is one final component of the most compelling versions of the nothing to hide argument—a comparison of the relative value of the privacy interest being threatened with the government interest in promoting security. As one commenter to my blog post astutely notes: "You can’t talk about how people feel about the potential loss of privacy in any meaningful way without recognizing that most of the people who don’t mind the NSA programs see it as a potential exchange of a small amount of privacy for a potential national security gain."38 In other words, the nothing to hide argument can be made by comparing the relative value between privacy and security. The value of privacy, the argument provides, is low, because the information is often not particularly sensitive. The ones with the most to worry about are the ones engaged in illegal conduct, and the value of protecting their privacy is low to nonexistent. On the government interest side of the balance, security has a very high value. Having a computer analyze the phone numbers one dials is not likely to expose deep dark secrets or embarrassing information to the world. The machine will simply move on, oblivious to any patterns that are not deemed suspicious. In other words, if you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

Therefore, in a more compelling form than is often expressed in popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument proceeds as follows: The NSA surveillance, data mining, or other government information-gathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Only those who are engaged in illegal activities have a reason to hide this information. Although there may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy. Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information.

Cast in this manner, the nothing to hide argument is a formidable one. It balances the degree to which an individual’s privacy is compromised by the limited disclosure of certain information against potent national security interests. Under such a balancing scheme, it is quite difficult for privacy to prevail.

For quite some time, scholars have proclaimed that privacy is so muddled a concept that it is of little use. According to Arthur Miller, privacy is "exasperatingly vague and evanescent."39 As Hyman Gross declares, "[T]he concept of privacy is infected with pernicious ambiguities."40 Colin Bennett similarly notes, "Attempts to define the concept of ‘privacy’ have generally not met with any success."41 Robert Post declares that "[p]rivacy is a value so complex, so entangled in competing and contradictory dimensions, so engorged with various and distinct meanings, that I sometimes despair whether it can be usefully addressed at all."42 "Perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy," Judith Jarvis Thomson observes, "is that nobody seems to have any very clear idea what it is."43

Often, the philosophical discourse about conceptualizing privacy is ignored in legal and policy debates. Many jurists, politicians, and scholars simply analyze the issues without articulating a conception of what privacy means. However, conceptualizing privacy is essential for the analysis of these issues. Those working on legal and policy issues all have some implicit conception of privacy. In many cases, privacy issues never get balanced against conflicting interests because courts, legislators, and others fail even to recognize that privacy is implicated. It is therefore of paramount importance that we continue to work on developing a conception of privacy. But how? Why have existing attempts been so unsatisfying?

A. A Pluralistic Conception of Privacy

Many attempts to conceptualize privacy do so by attempting to locate the essence of privacy—its core characteristics or the common denominator that links together the various things we classify under the rubric of "privacy." I refer to this as the traditional method of conceptualizing. This method seeks to understand privacy per genus et differentiam—by looking for necessary and sufficient elements that demarcate what privacy is.

In my article, Conceptualizing Privacy, I discussed a wide range of attempts to locate the common denominator of privacy.44 I examined several different candidates for the common denominator in the existing philosophical and legal literature. Some attempts to conceptualize privacy were too narrow, excluding things we commonly understand to be private. For example, several theorists have contended that privacy should be defined in terms of intimacy. According to philosopher Julie Inness: "[T]he content of privacy cannot be captured if we focus exclusively on either information, access, or intimate decisions because privacy involves all three areas. . . . I suggest that these apparently disparate areas are linked by the common denominator of intimacy—privacy’s content covers intimate information, access, and decisions."45 The problem with understanding privacy as intimacy, however, is that not all private information or decisions we make are intimate. For instance, our Social Security number, political affiliations, religious beliefs, and much more may not be intimate, but we may regard them as private. Of course, intimacy could be defined quite broadly, though then it merely becomes a synonym for privacy rather than an elaboration of what privacy means. The purpose of defining privacy as intimacy is to develop a bounded and coherent conception of privacy, but it comes at the cost of being far too narrow.

On the other hand, some attempts to conceptualize privacy are far too broad, such as Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s understanding of privacy as the "right to be let alone."46 What exactly does being let alone entail? There are many ways in which people are intruded upon that they would not consider privacy violations. If you shove me, you are not leaving me alone. You may be harming me, but it is not a problem of privacy.

Ultimately, any attempt to locate a common core to the manifold things we file under the rubric of "privacy" faces a difficult dilemma. If one chooses a common denominator that is broad enough to encompass nearly everything, then the conception risks the danger of being overinclusive or too vague. If one chooses a narrower common denominator, then the risk is that the conception is too restrictive. In Conceptualizing Privacy,

I surveyed the various proposed conceptions and found all to suffer from these problems.47

I argued that instead of conceptualizing privacy with the traditional method, we should instead understand privacy as a set of family resemblances. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that some concepts do not have "one thing in common" but "are related to one another in many different ways."48 Instead of being related by a common denominator, some things share "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail."49 In other words, privacy is not reducible to a singular essence; it is a plurality of different things that do not share one element in common but that nevertheless bear a resemblance to each other.

In my work on conceptualizing privacy thus far, I have attempted to lay the groundwork for a pluralistic understanding of privacy. In some works, I have attempted to analyze specific privacy issues, trying to better articulate the nature of the problems. For example, in my book, The Digital Person, I argued that the collection and use of personal information in databases presents a different set of problems than government surveillance.50 Many commentators had been using the metaphor of George Orwell’s 1984 to describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data.51 I contended that the Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control) might be apt to describe law enforcement’s monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status. Many people do not care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own or rent, or the kind of beverages they drink. People often do not take many steps to keep such information secret. Frequently, though not always, people’s activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information.

I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.52 The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

I explored the ways that legal and policy solutions were focusing too much on the nexus of problems under the Orwell metaphor—those of surveillance—and were not adequately addressing the Kafka problems—those of information processing.53 The difficulty was that commentators were trying to conceive of the problems caused by databases in terms of surveillance when, in fact, these problems were different. The way that these problems are conceived has a tremendous impact on the legal and policy solutions used to solve them. As John Dewey observed, "[A] problem well put is half-solved."54 "The way in which the problem is conceived," Dewey explained, "decides what specific suggestions are entertained and which are dismissed; what data are selected and which rejected; it is the criterion for relevancy and irrelevancy of hypotheses and conceptual structures."55

In a subsequent article, A Taxonomy of Privacy, I developed a taxonomy of privacy—a way of mapping out the manifold types of problems and harms that constitute privacy violations.56 The taxonomy is my attempt to formulate a model of the problems from studying the welter of laws, cases, issues, and cultural and historical materials. The taxonomy I developed is as follows:

Information Collection

Surveillance

Interrogation

Information Processing

Aggregation

Identification

Insecurity

Secondary Use

Exclusion

Information Dissemination

Breach of Confidentiality

Disclosure

Exposure

Increased Accessibility

Blackmail

Appropriation

Distortion

Invasion

Intrusion

Decisional Interference

The taxonomy has four general categories of privacy problems with sixteen different subcategories. The first general category is information collection, which involves the ways that data is gathered about people. The subcategories, surveillance and interrogation, represent the two primary problematic ways of gathering information. A privacy problem occurs when an activity by a person, business, or government entity creates harm by disrupting valuable activities of others. These harms need not be physical or emotional; they can occur by chilling socially beneficial behavior (for example, free speech and association) or by leading to power imbalances that adversely affect social structure (for example, excessive executive power).

The second general category is information processing. This involves the storing, analysis, and manipulation of data. There are a number of problems that information processing can cause, and I included five subcategories in my taxonomy. For example, one problem that I label insecurity results in increasing people’s vulnerability to potential abuse of their information.57 The problem that I call exclusion involves people’s inability to access and have any say in the way their data is used.58 Information dissemination is the third general category. Disseminating information involves the ways in which it is transferred—or threatened to be transferred—to others. I identify seven different information dissemination problems. Finally, the last category involves invasions. Invasions are direct interferences with the individual, such as intruding into her life or regulating the kinds of decisions she can make about her life.

My purpose in advancing the taxonomy is to shift away from the rather vague label of privacy in order to prevent distinct harms and problems from being conflated or not recognized. Some might contend, however, that several of the problems I discuss are not really "privacy" problems. But with no satisfactory set of necessary or sufficient conditions to define privacy, there is no one specific criterion for inclusion or exclusion under the rubric of "privacy." Privacy violations consist of a web of related problems that are not connected by a common element, but nevertheless bear some resemblances to each other. We can determine whether to classify something as falling in the domain of privacy if it bears resemblance to other things we similarly classify. In other words, we use a form of analogical reasoning in which "[t]he key task," Cass Sunstein observes, "is to decide when there are relevant similarities and differences."59 Accordingly, there are no clear boundaries for what we should or should not refer to as "privacy." Some might object to the lack of clear boundaries, but this objection assumes that having definitive boundaries matters. The quest for a traditional definition of privacy has led to a rather fruitless and unresolved debate. In the meantime, there are real problems that must be addressed, but they are either conflated or ignored because they do not fit into various prefabricated conceptions of privacy. The law often neglects to see the problems and instead ignores all things that do not fall into a particular conception of privacy. In this way, conceptions of privacy can prevent the examination of problems. The problems still exist regardless of whether we classify them as being "privacy" problems.

A great deal of attention is expended trying to elucidate the concept of privacy without looking at the problems we are facing. My goal is to begin with the problems and understand them in detail. Trying to fit them into a one-size-fits-all conception of privacy neglects to see the problems in their full dimensions or to understand them completely.

Conceptions should help us understand and illuminate experience; they should not detract from experience and make us see and understand less.

The term privacy is best used as a shorthand umbrella term for a related web of things. Beyond this kind of use, the term privacy has little purpose. In fact, it can obfuscate more than clarify.

Some might object to the inclusion or exclusion of certain problems in the taxonomy. I do not advance the taxonomy as perfect. It is a bottom-up ongoing project. As new problems arise, the taxonomy will be revised. Whether a particular problem is classified as one of privacy is not as important as whether it is recognized as a problem. Regardless of whether we label the problem as part of the privacy cluster, it still is a problem, and protecting against it still has a value. For example, I classify as a privacy violation a problem I call distortion, which involves disseminating false or misleading information about a person. Some might argue that distortion really is not a privacy harm, because privacy only involves true information. But does it matter? Regardless of whether distortion is classified as a privacy problem, it is nevertheless a problem. Classifying it as a privacy problem is merely saying that it bears some resemblance to other privacy problems, and viewing them together might be helpful in addressing them.

B. The Social Value of Privacy

Many theories of privacy view it as an individual right. For example, Thomas Emerson declares that privacy "is based upon premises of individualism, that the society exists to promote the worth and the dignity of the individual. . . . The right of privacy . . . is essentially the right not to participate in the collective life—the right to shut out the community."60 In the words of one court: "Privacy is inherently personal. The right to privacy recognizes the sovereignty of the individual."61

Traditionally, rights have often been understood as protecting the individual against the incursion of the community, based on respect for the individual’s personhood or autonomy. Many theories of privacy’s value understand privacy in this manner. For example, Charles Fried argues that privacy is one of the

basic rights in persons, rights to which all are entitled equally, by virtue of their status as persons. . . . In this sense, the view is Kantian; it requires recognition of persons as ends, and forbids the overriding of their most fundamental interests for the purpose of maximizing the happiness or welfare of all.62 autonomous beings with the capacity to love, care and like—in other words, persons with the potential to freely develop close relationships."); BEATE RÖSSLER, THE VALUE OF PRIVACY 117 (R.D.V. Glasgow trans., Polity Press 2005) (2001) ("Respect for a person’s privacy is respect for her as an autonomous subject."); Stanley I. Benn, Privacy, Freedom, and Respect for Persons, in NOMOS XIII: PRIVACY 1, 26 (J. Roland Pennock & John W. Chapman eds., 1971) ("[R]espect for someone as a person, as a chooser, implie[s] respect for him as one engaged on a kind of self-creative enterprise, which could be disrupted, distorted, or frustrated even by so limited an intrusion as watching.").

Many of the interests that conflict with privacy, however, also involve people’s autonomy and dignity. Free speech, for example, is also an individual right which is essential to autonomy. Yet, in several cases, it clashes with privacy. One’s privacy can be in direct conflict with another’s desire to speak about that person’s life. Security, too, is not merely a societal interest; it is essential for individual autonomy as well. Autonomy and dignity are often on both sides of the balance, so it becomes difficult to know which side is the one that protects the "sovereignty of the individual."63

Communitarian scholars launch a formidable critique of traditional accounts of individual rights. Amitai Etzioni, for example, contends that privacy is "a societal license that exempts a category of acts (including thoughts and emotions) from communal, public, and governmental scrutiny."64 For Etzioni, many theories of privacy treat it as sacrosanct, even when it conflicts with the common good.65 According to Etzioni, "privacy is not an absolute value and does not trump all other rights or concerns for the common good."66 He goes on to demonstrate how privacy interferes with greater social interests and often, though not always, contends that privacy should lose out in the balance.67

Etzioni is right to critique those who argue that privacy is an individual right that should trump social interests. The problem, however, is that utilitarian balancing between individual rights and the common good rarely favors individual rights—unless the interest advanced on the side of the common good is trivial. Society will generally win when its interests are balanced against those of the individual.

The deeper problem with Etzioni’s view is that in his critique of liberal theories of individual rights as absolutes, he views individual rights as being in tension with society. The same dichotomy between individual and society that pervades liberal theories of individual rights also pervades Etzioni’s communitarianism. Etzioni views the task of communitarians as "balanc[ing] individual rights with social responsibilities, and individuality with community."68 The problem with Etzioni’s communitarian view is that individuality need not be on the opposite side of the scale from community. Such a view assumes that individual and societal interests are distinct and conflicting. A similar view also underpins many liberal conceptions of individual rights.

In contrast, John Dewey proposed an alternative theory about the relationship between individual and community. For Dewey, there is no strict dichotomy between individual and society. The individual is shaped by society, and the good of both the individual and society are often interrelated rather than antagonistic: "We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social beings. Hence we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and of their good."69 Dewey contended that the value of protecting individual rights emerges from their contribution to society. In other words, individual rights are not trumps, but are protections by society from its intrusiveness. Society makes space for the individual because of the social benefits this space provides. Therefore, Dewey argues, rights should be valued based on "the contribution they make to the welfare of the community."70 Otherwise, in any kind of utilitarian calculus, individual rights would not be valuable enough to outweigh most social interests, and it would be impossible to justify individual rights. As such, Dewey argued, we must insist upon a "social basis and social justification" for civil liberties.71

I contend, like Dewey, that the value of protecting the individual is a social one. Society involves a great deal of friction, and we are constantly clashing with each other. Part of what makes a society a good place in which to live is the extent to which it allows people freedom from the intrusiveness of others. A society without privacy protection would be suffocating, and it might not be a place in which most would want to live. When protecting individual rights, we as a society decide to hold back in order to receive the benefits of creating the kinds of free zones for individuals to flourish.

As Robert Post has argued, privacy is not merely a set of restraints on society’s rules and norms. Instead, privacy constitutes a society’s attempt to promote rules of behavior, decorum, and civility.72 Society protects privacy as a means of enforcing a kind of order in the community. As Spiros Simitis declares, "[P]rivacy considerations no longer arise out of particular individual problems; rather, they express conflicts affecting everyone."73 Several scholars have argued that privacy is "constitutive" of society and must be valued in terms of the social roles it plays.74 Privacy, then, is not the trumpeting of the individual against society’s interests, but the protection of the individual based on society’s own norms and values. Privacy is not simply a way to extricate individuals from social control, as it is itself a form of social control that emerges from a society’s norms. It is not an external restraint on society, but is in fact an internal dimension of society. Therefore, privacy has a social value. Even when it protects the individual, it does so for the sake of society. It thus should not be weighed as an individual right against the greater social good. Privacy issues involve balancing societal interests on both sides of the scale.

Because privacy involves protecting against a plurality of different harms or problems, the value of privacy is different depending upon which particular problem or harm 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 kind of problem or harm we are safeguarding against. Thus, to understand privacy, we must conceptualize it and its value more pluralistically. 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 upon the nature of each problem.

IV. THE PROBLEM WITH THE "NOTHING TO HIDE" ARGUMENT

A. Understanding the Many Dimensions of Privacy

It is time to return to the nothing to hide argument. The reasoning of this argument is that when it comes to government surveillance or use of personal data, there is no privacy violation if a person has nothing sensitive, embarrassing, or illegal to conceal. Criminals involved in illicit activities have something to fear, but for the vast majority of people, their activities are not illegal or embarrassing.

Understanding privacy as I have set forth reveals the flaw of the nothing to hide argument at its roots. Many commentators who respond to the argument attempt a direct refutation by trying to point to things that people would want to hide. But the problem with the nothing to hide argument is the 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. As Bruce Schneier aptly notes, the nothing to hide argument stems from a faulty "premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong."75

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. In the categories in my taxonomy, several problems are implicated.

The NSA programs involve problems of information collection, specifically the category of surveillance in the taxonomy. Wiretapping involves audio surveillance of people’s conversations. Data mining often begins with the collection of personal information, usually from various third parties that possess people’s data. Under current Supreme Court Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, when the government gathers data from third parties, there is no Fourth Amendment protection because people lack a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in information exposed to others.76 In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court concluded that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in bank records because "[a]ll of the documents obtained, including financial statements and deposit slips, contain only information voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business."77 In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that people lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they "know that they must convey numerical information to the phone company," and therefore they cannot "harbor any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret."78 As I have argued extensively elsewhere, the lack of Fourth Amendment protection of third party records results in the government’s ability to access an extensive amount of personal information with minimal limitation or oversight.79

Many scholars have referred to information collection as a form of surveillance. Dataveillance, a term coined by Roger Clarke, refers to the "systemic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons."80 Christopher Slobogin has referred to the gathering of personal information in business records as "transaction surveillance."81 Surveillance can create chilling effects on free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.82 Even surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them. The value of protecting against chilling effects is not measured simply by focusing on the particular individuals who are deterred from exercising their rights. Chilling effects harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity.

The nothing to hide argument focuses primarily on the information collection problems associated with the NSA programs. It contends that limited surveillance of lawful activity will not chill behavior sufficiently to outweigh the security benefits. One can certainly quarrel with this argument, but one of the difficulties with chilling effects is that it is often very hard to demonstrate concrete evidence of deterred behavior.83 Whether the NSA’s surveillance and collection of telephone records has deterred people from communicating particular ideas would be a difficult question to answer.

Far too often, discussions of the NSA surveillance and data mining define the problem solely in terms of surveillance. To return to my discussion of metaphor, 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 behavior, but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its exclusion of the protagonist from having any knowledge or participation in the process. The harms consist of those created by bureaucracies—indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability. One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges from the combination of small bits of seemingly innocuous data.84 When combined, the information becomes much more telling about a person. For the person who truly has nothing to hide, aggregation is not much of a problem. But in the stronger, less absolutist form of the nothing to hide argument, people argue that certain pieces of information are not something they would hide. Aggregation, however, means that by combining pieces of information we might not care to conceal, the government can glean information about us that we might really want to conceal. Part of the allure of data mining for the government is its ability to reveal a lot about our personalities and activities by sophisticated means of analyzing data. Therefore, without greater transparency in data mining, it is hard to claim that programs like the NSA data mining program will not reveal information people might want to hide, as we do not know precisely what is revealed. Moreover, data mining aims to be predictive of behavior, striving to prognosticate about our future actions. People who match certain profiles are deemed likely to engage in a similar pattern of behavior. It is quite difficult to refute actions that one has not yet done. Having nothing to hide will not always dispel predictions of future activity.

Another problem in the taxonomy, which is implicated by the NSA program, is the problem I refer to as exclusion.85 Exclusion is the problem caused when people are prevented from having knowledge about how their information is being used, as well as barred from being able to access and correct errors in that data. The NSA program involves a massive database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, the very existence of the program was kept secret for years.86 This kind of information processing, which forbids people’s knowledge or involvement, resembles in some ways a kind of due process problem. It is a structural problem involving the way people are treated by government institutions. Moreover, it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent should the Executive Branch and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant power over citizens? This issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government.

A related problem involves "secondary use." Secondary use is the use of data obtained for one purpose for a different unrelated purpose without the person’s consent. The Administration has said little about how long the data will be stored, how it will be used, and what it could be used for in the future. The potential future uses of any piece of personal information are vast, and without limits or accountability on how that information is used, it is hard for people to assess the dangers of the data being in the government’s control.

Therefore, the problem with the nothing to hide argument is that it focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems—the disclosure of personal information or surveillance—and not others. It assumes a particular view about what privacy entails, and it sets the terms for debate in a manner that is often unproductive.

It is important to distinguish here between two ways of justifying a program such as the NSA surveillance and data mining program. The first way is to not recognize a problem. This is how the nothing to hide argument works—it denies even the existence of a problem. The second manner of justifying such a program is to acknowledge the problems but contend that the benefits of the NSA program outweigh the privacy harms. The first justification influences the second, because the low value given to privacy is based upon a narrow view of the problem.

The key misunderstanding is that the nothing to hide argument views privacy in a particular way—as a form of secrecy, as the right to hide things. But there are many other types of harm involved beyond exposing one’s secrets to the government.

Privacy problems are often difficult to recognize and redress because they create a panoply of types of harm. Courts, legislators, and others look for particular types of harm to the exclusion of others, and their narrow focus blinds them to seeing other kinds of harms.

B. Understanding Structural Problems

One of the difficulties with the nothing to hide argument is that it looks for a visceral kind of injury as opposed to a structural one. Ironically, this underlying conception of injury is shared by both those advocating for greater privacy protections and those arguing in favor of the conflicting interests to privacy. For example, law professor Ann Bartow argues that I have failed to describe privacy harms in a compelling manner in my article, A Taxonomy of Privacy, where I provide a framework for understanding the manifold different privacy problems.87 Bartow’s primary complaint is that my taxonomy "frames privacy harms in dry, analytical terms that fail to sufficiently identify and animate the compelling ways that privacy violations can negatively impact the lives of living, breathing human beings beyond simply provoking feelings of unease."88 Bartow claims that the taxonomy does not have "enough dead bodies" and that privacy’s "lack of blood and death, or at least of broken bones and buckets of money, distances privacy harms from other categories of tort law."89

Most privacy problems lack dead bodies. Of course, there are exceptional cases such as the murders of Rebecca Shaeffer and Amy Boyer. Rebecca Shaeffer was an actress killed when a stalker obtained her address from a Department of Motor Vehicles record.90 This incident prompted Congress to pass the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994.91 Amy Boyer was murdered by a stalker who obtained her personal information, including her work address and Social Security number, from a database company.92 These examples aside, there is not a lot of death and gore in privacy law. If this is the standard to recognize a problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized. Horrific cases are not typical, and the purpose of my taxonomy is to explain why most privacy problems are still harmful despite this fact.

Bartow’s objection is actually very similar to the nothing to hide argument. Those advancing the nothing to hide argument have in mind a particular kind of visceral privacy harm, one where privacy is violated only when something deeply embarrassing or discrediting is revealed. Bartow’s quest for horror stories represents a similar desire to find visceral privacy harms. The problem is that not all privacy harms are like this. At the end of the day, privacy is not a horror movie, and demanding more palpable harms will be difficult in many cases. Yet there is still a harm worth addressing, even if it is not sensationalistic.

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 through a series of small acts by different actors. Bartow wants to point to a major spill, but gradual pollution by a multitude of different actors often creates worse problems.

The law frequently struggles with recognizing harms that do not result in embarrassment, humiliation, or physical or psychological injury.93 For example, after the September 11 attacks, several airlines gave their passenger records to federal agencies in direct violation of their privacy policies. The federal agencies used the data to study airline security.94 A group of passengers sued Northwest Airlines for disclosing their personal information. One of their claims was that Northwest Airlines breached its contract with the passengers. In Dyer v. Northwest Airlines Corp., the court rejected the contract claim because "broad statements of company policy do not generally give rise to contract claims," the passengers never claimed they relied upon the policy or even read it, and they "failed to allege any contractual damages arising out of the alleged breach."95 Another court reached a similar conclusion.96

Regardless of the merits of the decisions on contract law, the cases represent a difficulty with the legal system in addressing privacy problems.

The disclosure of the passenger records represented a "breach of confidentiality."97 The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is maintained in relationships between businesses and their customers. The problem of secondary use is also implicated in this case.98 Secondary use involves data collected for one purpose being used for an unrelated purpose without people’s consent. The airlines gave passenger information to the government for an entirely different purpose beyond that for which it was originally gathered. Secondary use problems often do not cause financial, or even psychological, injuries. Instead, the harm is one of power imbalance. In Dyer, data was disseminated in a way that ignored airline passengers’ interests in the data despite promises made in the privacy policy. Even if the passengers were unaware of the policy, there is a social value in ensuring that companies adhere to established limits on the way they use personal information. Otherwise, any stated limits become meaningless, and companies have discretion to boundlessly use data. Such a state of affairs can leave nearly all consumers in a powerless position. The harm, then, is less one to particular individuals than it is a structural harm.

A similar problem surfaces in another case, Smith v. Chase Manhattan Bank.99 A group of plaintiffs sued Chase Manhattan Bank for selling customer information to third parties in violation of its privacy policy, which stated that the information would remain confidential. The court held that even presuming these allegations were true, the plaintiffs could not prove any actual injury:

[T]he "harm" at the heart of this purported class action, is that class members were merely offered products and services which they were free to decline. This does not qualify as actual harm.

The complaint does not allege any single instance where a named plaintiff or any class member suffered any actual harm due to the receipt of an unwanted telephone solicitation or a piece of junk mail.100

The court’s view of harm, however, did not account for the breach of confidentiality.

When balancing privacy against security, the privacy harms are often characterized in terms of injuries to the individual, and the interest in security is often characterized in a more broad societal way. The security interest in the NSA programs has often been defined improperly. In a Congressional hearing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated:

Our enemy is listening, and I cannot help but wonder if they are not shaking their heads in amazement at the thought that anyone would imperil such a sensitive program by leaking its existence in the first place, and smiling at the prospect that we might now disclose even more or perhaps even unilaterally disarm ourselves of a key tool in the war on terror.101

The balance between privacy and security is often cast in terms of whether a particular government information collection activity should or should not be barred.

The issue, however, often is not whether the NSA or other government agencies should be allowed to engage in particular forms of information gathering; rather, it is what kinds of oversight and accountability we want in place when the government engages in searches and seizures. The government can employ nearly any kind of investigatory activity with a warrant supported by probable cause. This is a mechanism of oversight—it forces government officials to justify their suspicions to a neutral judge or magistrate before engaging in the tactic. For example, electronic surveillance law allows for wiretapping, but limits the practice with judicial supervision, procedures to minimize the breadth of the wiretapping, and requirements that the law enforcement officials report back to the court to prevent abuses.102 It is these procedures that the Bush Administration has ignored by engaging in the warrantless NSA surveillance. The question is not whether we want the government to monitor such conversations, but whether the Executive Branch should adhere to the appropriate oversight procedures that Congress has enacted into law, or should covertly ignore any oversight.

Therefore, the security interest should not get weighed in its totality against the privacy interest. Rather, what should get weighed is the extent of marginal limitation on the effectiveness of a government information gathering or data mining program by imposing judicial oversight and minimization procedures. Only in cases where such procedures will completely impair the government program should the security interest be weighed in total, rather than in the marginal difference between an unencumbered program versus a limited one.

Far too often, the balancing of privacy interests against security interests takes place in a manner that severely shortchanges the privacy interest while inflating the security interests. Such is the logic of the nothing to hide argument. When the argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, in which it draws power from its unfair advantage. It is time to pull the curtain on the nothing to hide argument.

V. CONCLUSION

Whether explicit or not, conceptions of privacy underpin nearly every argument made about privacy, even the common quip "I’ve got nothing to hide." As I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, understanding privacy as a pluralistic conception reveals that we are often talking past each other when discussing privacy issues. By focusing more specifically on the related problems under the rubric of "privacy," we can better address each problem rather than ignore or conflate them. The nothing to hide argument speaks to some problems, but not to others. It 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.

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
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Updated on 10/03/2023 20:05