Misunderstandings About Privacy and Security

In Daniel J. Solove’s piece, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,” he argues that part of the sentiment of “having nothing to hide” when it comes to government monitoring and surveillance for the sake of security is that the benefits outweigh the risks and intrusion, and people shouldn’t worry if they aren’t engaged in anything unlawful. There is also the idea of the individual person’s privacy pitted against the security of society. He argues that this should not be so, because part of why a society functions well is because “even when it protects the individual, it [privacy] does so for the sake of society,” and goes on to say that “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.” He also argues that not all issues of privacy are equal, so we cannot “ascribe an abstract value to privacy,” but should conceptualize privacy pluralistically.

Through this piece, I learned about the problems of aggregation and exclusion. Aggregation is when data-mining combines small amounts of information about a person that they wouldn’t necessarily hide but when put together the government may have more information on a person than they would like, as well as try to predict their behavior. Exclusion is the problem caused when people are prevented from having knowledge about how their information is used, as well as not being able to correct errors in that data. Solove says that the “nothing to hide” argument focuses on just one or two kinds of privacy problems such as disclosure of personal information and surveillance, but does not include others like those mentioned above.