The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
53 comments
·December 20, 2025alan-crowe
My "importance of privacy" story:
I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind of dispute is that the bills give the serial numbers of the meters. The bill from Scottish Power gives the same meter serial numbers that are embossed on the front of my meters, and is therefore valid. The bill from Ovo Energy gives different serial numbers and is therefore in error.
Picture though the internal processes in Ovo Energy. A second clerk is tasked with attending to the problem. He has a choice. He can change the address to agree with the meter serial numbers, correcting the error. Or he can change the meter serial numbers to those for my address, compounding the error.
Since the meter serial numbers are confidential, to me and Scottish Power, Ovo Energy does not have the second option; they do not know the serial numbers (which are long, like a credit card number, not just 1,2,3,...). Thus the clerical error gets corrected, or just left, but not compounded.
My guess is that confidential information, (such as meter serial numbers, credit card numbers, and account numbers), are the front like of defence against both clerical error and fraud based on impersonation. It is a rather weak defence, but it is light weight, and seems to how much of billing and billing disputes work.
We all have lots to hide: the confidential information that the system needs us to keep confidential to stop clerical errors from compounding.
deepstate25
This is a valid story and I’m sorry to hear that you went through this. However, it’s a strawman for the current argument from the blog post, which is that living life in the open and acting normal is setting things up for failure, and I don’t believe that it is.
Having nothing to hide is fine. Nothing to hide and doing nothing wrong is least likely to cause trouble.
The blog post’s argument that someone would be more likely to get watched if they start hiding after not hiding is not valid. ALL encrypted and unencrypted communication is a valid target for analysis, but ANY encrypted traffic is obviously more of a concern, just like one person walking into a store brandishing a gun is as alarming as 5 brandishing guns, and it doesn’t matter whether they used to not carry guns into the store.
fn-mote
> Having nothing to hide is fine.
This statement completely fails to engage with the post.
In fact, the parent's whole "argument" ignores the prevalence of encrypted communications in the modern world. To use their (absurd) gun analogy, the modern internet is close to an open-carry state. (Europeans: this means everyone can carry a gun visibly.)
Everyone uses https by default. Phone communications and texts are the least secure by far.
PS There is nothing wrong with the GP's anecdote. It is an excellent argument, understandable argument for casual importance of privacy.
fernando__
If there were 1 brandishing a gun, I’d be very alarmed.
If there were 5, I’d be even more alarmed.
If everyone in the store and outside the store were always brandishing guns, then it would be a very dangerous place.
Speaking of dangerous places- how about the U.S.?
The U.S. gun death rate is approximately 13.7 per 100,000 people, while the UK rate is roughly 0.04 per 100,000—making the U.S. rate over 300 times higher. This is likely because of UK’s stringent gun laws.
So, if everyone hid their internet traffic, does that mean there would be a 300% increase in hacker crime and convictions? And wouldn’t governments and companies be more likely to develop and use tools for spying on their citizens and employees?
bobbyschmidd
telco guy comes in at point x in past, takes a pic of your meters while you don't attend. privacy fucked. but obscuring stuff like that behind temper proof (mwemphasis on proof) the glitter?
sjducb
When people say they have nothing to hide I like to remind them about fraud and criminals.
All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters.
Fraudsters often get their hands on government data through breeches and bribery.
Also fraudsters pretend to be government agents to get data from big tech companies. So any channel that governments use to get data from tech companies is abused by fraudsters to commit crime.
Fraud is a very big deal. The UK economy loses 219 billion per year to fraud. Our national deficit payment is 93 billion per year and we spend 188 billion on the NHS.
If we improved privacy of all of our citizens then the savings from fraud reduction would cover our entire government deficit
heisenbit
You don‘t need fraudsters just a run of the mill bully is enough. I remember a phase in my life where I had to do some high visibility reporting. I showed all underlying facts, methodology and conclusions and every week the bully tore into a minor detail devaluing my work and distracting from vital tasks. Only when I started shielding data and my reasoning as private and just delivering high level summary results I was able to put an end to it.
BLKNSLVR
> We must all become deviations
Already there friend.
I feel that I have nothing to hide, but I do my darnedest to ensure that it costs a maximal amount of time and effort to find that out.
If a random stranger (law enforcement or otherwise) wants to know shit about me, then I'm immediately creeped out and the last thing I want to do is make (online) stalking of me an easy task. The harder it is, the more likely they'll give up and move on to someone else (pending their reasons).
As it should be for everyone.
Edited to add: One thing I can tell you from experience: law enforcement only look for things that will confirm their suspicions. They do not look for counter evidence, no matter how obvious it is or how easy it is to find - even within government records to which they would already have access.
As such, beware what trail you leave, if it suits the right (wrong) agenda, it will be used to point in the worst possible direction.
general1465
If we have nothing to hide, then I want every politician to have every bit of communication publicly available and searchable.
We are stopping corruption here, so only corrupt people could oppose such decision and they should be immediately investigated.
codethief
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.)
PunchyHamster
I prefer short and snarky "then drop your pants". Shuts up most.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
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.
bobbyschmidd
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 ...
ankur3
"You hide from those whom you don't trust!"
so now comes the question...
"How much do you trust a human, despite being your favourite?".....
We need to learn about 'trust' and its role in our lives!
Information is power! And 'trust' me, you don't want to give it to anyone over you!
The upcoming era of transparency will come in the form of compliances (or, chains) you will never withdraw yourself from! Surely facility and security will baited for this!
Also, with the rise in the fields of biotech and nano-tech, infused with A.I., they are preparing us to be their 'lab rats', and they don't need our consents! We shouldn't be ignoring this at all!
NGRhodes
"I have nothing to hide" only makes sense if privacy and disclosure are treated as a binary. In reality, both exist on a spectrum: privacy is controlled disclosure, shaped by what is shared, with whom, at what level of detail, and under what power asymmetry.
Large surveillance systems inevitably build baselines. They don't just detect crimes; they detect patterns and anomalies relative to whatever becomes "normal".
The problem with "nothing to hide" is that it defaults to maximal disclosure. Data is persistent, aggregatable, and reinterpretable as norms and regimes change. The data doesn't.
This isn't purely individual. Your disclosures can expose others through contact graphs and inference, regardless of intent. And it doesn't matter whether the collector is the state or a company; aggregation and reuse work the same way.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Yes. In that realm, absence, too, is a signal; perpaps stronger one than just random chatter.
Wowfunhappy
> And then comes the part they can't (or won't) fathom. The context shifts. The political winds change. The Overton window slams shut on a belief they once held. A book they read is declared subversive. A group they donated to is re-classified as extremist. A joke they told is now evidence of a thoughtcrime.
There are at least some people who would respond by (still) saying "I have nothing to hide." They are proud of their moral choices and confident in their convictions. Arrest them if you dare.
I wonder if the author still has contempt for them?
bloomingeek
I think the author is trying to say in today's world we face a sort of moral/societal vacuum of privacy. The more we try to remain private, whether by being an open book or by some type of digital way, it's basically futile or will eventually be broken.
My spin, as a recovering perfectionist, is when you've done everything you can to be "innocent" and the political or whatever wind changes, the pit of despair is a real and devastating thing. When this happens, sometimes the decisions that are made are desperate.
advael
In many moral frameworks, inconsistency isn't the only wrong someone can commit. The argument constructed in this article is essentially utilitarian, making the claim that the mechanisms of surveillance and privacy make this behavior harmful to others, regardless of their intentions or internal sense of morality. In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all, although I suppose that's not a completely unreasonable thing to infer. From the perspective of this argument, this only lacks the harm the "deviancy signal" would itself do to the individual, though in the oppressive regime proposed they would perhaps take greater risk by openly deviating
Wowfunhappy
> In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all
The article opens with:
>> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide."
Which isn't literally saying "I hate them" but I'm not sure how else to interpret "a special kind of contempt." Regardless, I've edited my original post.
nkrisc
Why not interpret contempt as “contempt”, which is not “hate”?
filterfish
Contempt is very different to hate.
nkrisc
What’s important to hide is always changing. So even if you have nothing to hide now, you may wish you had hidden it in the future.
duskdozer
It's so difficult to get people to think that way, it's like they feel like they have plot armor like in a movie.
itopaloglu83
Pre-WW2 census in Germany was conducted by IBM and included religion and other family origin related questions.
Fast forward a few years and the Nazi regime used census results to go after every family that was undesirable for them using the census data they bought from IBM.
Privacy and anonymity are not needed until they are desperately required.
coldtea
This can be read as if IBM did this unknowingly and only before WW2.
But IBM knew what they were assisting with, and even pre-WW2 was already assisting the Nazi regime of 1933-1939. And they didn't stop come WW2, if anything IBM opened new subsidiaries and continued throughout the second world war.
"(...) IBM leased, rather than sold, its machines. The company retained control of punch-card supply and provided service through subsidiaries. Each set of cards was custom-designed to Nazi requirements. He later wrote that the IBM headquarters in New York oversaw these arrangements through subsidiaries across Europe"
"(...) IBM New York created a subsidiary in Poland, Watson Business Machines, after the 1939 invasion. The firm managed railway traffic in the General Government and ran a punch-card printing shop near the Warsaw Ghetto. He stated that this subsidiary reported through Geneva to IBM New York, and revenues were transferred accordingly."
t0bia_s
- I have nothing to hide.
- Sure, but why are you closing the door when taking sh*? Is your sh*ing somehow special?
Ok so this "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is so recurrent I once went looking where it came from.
The oldest account I found is in a religious book from 1832 [1]: "We must have nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but, and this is the important bit, this is in the context of your relationship with Christ.
Later accounts are mostly from judicial documents like "well tell us what happened, if you have nothing to hide, you'll have nothing to fear".
And later on we start to see the current form of the argument related to privacy, except now this argument is never directly used to erode it. It will always be in some form of "ok now we have to do this collective thing because of criminals, because of terrorism, because of protect the children, etc.". If you search "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" 100% of the results are about how it is a logical fallacy, nobody at all seems to defend the argument and yet, here we are!
Food for thought:
- this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)
- many governments, organizations and in any case the people in position of power and authority can develop a god complex (power corrupts etc.)
So unless I end up dealing with an all-loving and all-forgiving entity I could fully trust, I'd like to keep my right to privacy, thank you very much!
[1] https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Sermons_on_the_Spiritual...