> Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me.
But I "trust" the gouvernement in a different way that I trust you.
- With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff.
- I'm worried that you could judge me in a different way than the government would judge me. Because if you are a friend I care how you see me. But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care.
Are you a lawyer? How confident are you that you aren't doing something illegal? At 30 seconds of thinking of an interesting example, there are still blasphemy laws on the books [0] in some parts of Europe and it isn't clear how compliant what people say at home is with hate speech laws. And there are a lot of laws out there that most people don't know about.
There isn't any reason to think people are obeying the laws in the privacy of their own spaces. Historically there are actually good reasons to think people are disobeying the law, but the laws are stupid and it is better not to check unless there is a political opponent to take out (eg, anti-homosexuality regulations).
Some countries have defacto blasphemy laws as part of hate speech (in Europe) or social harmony (in Asia) laws. This is covered in the wikipedia article
There are definitely more countries that have blasphemy laws than are on the list on that page (e.g. Sri Lanka).
I, and everyone else, are doing illegal things all the time. As you point out, that's the nature of our legal system. So it's not terribly persuasive to say, "well are you sure you're not doing anything illegal" because it misunderstands the reason why we all haven't gotten arrested. It's not because of privacy but because almost all of us are below the notice of the police. You even cite an example of how privacy doesn't save you in exactly the cases where you think it ought to.
There are arguments for maintaining privacy but I don't really think this is one of them.
You seem to be arguing something slightly off the thread topic. Jenadine typed "But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care".
And I'm not sure who you are to say you are "below" the notice of the police. The police are primarily there to police the people at the bottom of society. The higher up the ladder of social status people climb the less they have to do with the police.
FBI employees have been stalking their ex-girlfriend using FBI database. That’s what we mean with “You may be doing things the government doesn’t like” — Abusive boyfriends can be part of a local government.
> Most people do that to obtain one suitable mate, and have a few offspring.
I'm not sure most people get a medical degree to "obtain one suitable mate and have a few offspring". I think most people do that to be a medical practitioner.
You could say people want to be medical practitioners because they want to find love and start a family but you could also say they want it because they want to be comfortably wealthy and financially secure.
Yes, but that's why this is a hack. Smart enough to not want to take care of 100+ children and child support, and you even get paid by the people who take care of your child for you.
(Not saying it's moral, hacking may or may not be moral.)
1) Trust is a human-to-human interaction which depends on being able to predict future behavior from past behavior (and often other cues, whether rational or not).
Trusting an organization is a category error. You cannot trust something composed of people who are regularly replaced every few years and who operate according to written rules ("laws") which they are allowed to change.
2) "as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care" - This is a fallacy. First, they can absolutely harass you even if you end up winning in court eventually. Second, what is legal and illegal changes over time. Third, plenty of things which are illegal (wrong according to legality) are not wrong according to morality (they harm no-one) - they are just illegal because humans who feel the need to control others wrote down a piece of text describing punishments for them.
3) Plenty of countries have stupid laws.:
Example 1: it's illegal to approve illegal actions - which basically means you can't ever argue for to change the law to make something legal because you'd be approving it. Usually it's not enforced as such but given how the law is often phrased, it often can be.
Example 2: it's illegal to endorse the use of violence - this is the stupidest law there is:
- It is by definition contradictory because all governments base their power on violence[0] so according to this law you can't support the existence of the government itself.
- It's contradictory in how it treats historical and current actions. You are free to celebrate the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, The French Revolution or Us independence, even though they were all violent actions - they were morally good but illegal under the laws at the time. But you can't say that current dictators should be killed. A friend got a warning from reddit just yesterday for saying not that a certain dictator should be assassinated but that he should be sentenced to death and then executed by anyone in a position to do so.
[0]: The government has such a strong monopoly that the violence just needs to be implied and most people will submit and the rest are used as examples "this is why it's stupid to fight a cop".
> A friend got a warning from reddit just yesterday for saying not that a certain dictator should be assassinated but that he should be sentenced to death and then executed by anyone in a position to do so.
A lot of social media today will sanction you if you say such things as "it's ok to punch a Nazi". But won't sanction a Nazi for saying things like "white replacement theory".
Yes, it's simple pattern matching. But they are gonna get better though, there are people working on using LLMs for surveillance right now.
AFAIK it was automated, she appealed and won. But it has a chilling effect on people and some won't bother appealing. I'd do it anyway just to waste their time because they have to use a human to review.
Corporations these days have way more power to control speech than governments just a few decades ago and some people still refuse to call it censorship because they find some obscure definition which says it has to be done by a government.
We will have to fight for the same freedoms as just a few generations ago because people learned nothing.
> Because if you are a friend I care how you see me. But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care.
Then an election happens and people who very much care about your previously non-illegal behavior gain access to years of historical data.
But I "trust" the gouvernement in a different way that I trust you.
- With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff.
- I'm worried that you could judge me in a different way than the government would judge me. Because if you are a friend I care how you see me. But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care.
(Just playing devil's advocate here)