To anyone who says "I have nothing to hide" I respond with "Unfortunately, you are not the one who gets to decide whether what you have is worth hiding."
(I think I first might have come across this beautifully succinct and unfortunately very true counter in a Reddit AMA with Edward Snowden way back when, but I might be misremembering.)
I prefer short and snarky "then drop your pants". Shuts up most.
Maybe "give me your bank PIN" for those that have been waiting for an excuse to drop their pants.
Both of these are not good responses and are easily discounted by most people ("I don't take nude photos"/"I never tell anyone my pin").
Average people see zero equivalence between sending nudes or their bank pin to a specific stranger and Google keeping a record of every website they've ever visited.
Surely the "I never tell anyone my pin" is just an admission that they do have something to hide?
The point is that there are many things that should be kept private/secret and often the need for that secrecy isn't obvious to people who have never been in particular situations. A woman trying to escape from an abusive relationship may need to keep her location secret to avoid being murdered by her ex, but your typical white male who declares "nothing to hide" may have difficulty in understanding that, whereas they may be able to grasp why their PIN should be kept secret.
I understand the point, but you're taking their statement "I have nothing to hide" way too literally, and these sorts of arguments based on literal interpretations rarely convince anyone. Has anyone actually ever been convinced to take privacy more seriously by this "insight"?
It's not so much a method to convince people to take privacy more seriously, but demonstrating that people who say "I have nothing to hide" haven't really thought about it and how it's such a ridiculous statement.
My aim would be to get people to understand that everyone has stuff that should be kept secret and that it varies according to their circumstances.
I was using "surely you won't mind public webcam in your bedroom then?" too
I was thinking a little about it lately. Not the saying itself, but the positioning to the general public. The annoying reality is that for most of the things that I consider important enough to voice discontent over ( and maybe even suppress need for convenience for ) are not always easy to 'present'. Note that it is not even always easy here either, but we do, by design, give one another a charitable read.
Hell, look at me, I care and I accepted some of it as price to pay for house peace.
yeah, it's a cascade. maybe you are not a threat to gov or corp but locally there's people who are like the people in clubs who spike you because they want you out or because they want your girls or the girls you will steal from them. info can be power. rumors, gossip, your browsing history, what you draw, what you code in your free time, what you talk to your kids about, what they do with that when they visit "friends" who already had info that you decided wasn't worth hiding ... from your kids ...
all can and will be used to induce stress or to divert attention of the young ones.
governments used to build massive societies and create rules and order and kaizen infrastructures that would get us as far away from the dark ages as possible ... but here we are closing that gap again. Go VCs! Go Agents! Go Puppies of Wall Street! Go work for LLM companies instead of using those big capable brains of yours for something other than personalized copypastable copypastacopypasta ...
"the other girls and kids made it through, and so will you, just let it happen, let it be" and so it goes ...