"The We All Need Something To Hide Argument" 

The nothing-to-hide argument (Solove, 2011) pervades discussions about 
privacy and can be formulated like this: when the government gathers or 
analyzes personal information and people declare they are not worried, 
"I've got nothing to hide" entails "if you are doing something wrong you 
don't deserve to keep it private."   
Apparently it seems easy to dismiss the argument, as it is quite clear 
that everyone has something to conceal or that everybody [probably] has 
something to hide from somebody. But this kind of attacks to the 
nothing-to-hide argument are weak since they deal with extreme cases when 
formulated, such as "so if you've got nothing to hide can I see your naked 
pictures?", which are trivially misleading. In a less extreme form, the 
argument refers not to all personal information, but only to the type of 
data the government is likely to collect. In this form the argument is 
stronger, since the governments can justify a series of data collections 
for several purposes. 
For Slove the deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it 
myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy and from that he identifies 
harmful consequences such as data exclusion, secondary use and data 
distortion. 

In this paper I present the 'we all need something to hide argument', a 
different perspective to the nothing-to-hide argument based on Slove's 
Kafkaesque problem. First I'll show how that the Kafkaesque problem 
relates to issues of information processing — the storage, use, or 
analysis of data, rather than of information collection. Then I'll present 
how these issues affect social structure by altering the kind of 
relationships people have with the institutions that make important 
decisions about their lives. Next I'll show the taxonomy of malware 
polymorphism to present cases where syntactic structures of programs are 
changed without semantic change along with code packing techniques used to 
obfuscate the understanding of the malware by an analyst, also used by 
malware to evade an antivirus system’s detection. Finally I'll argue 
that the syntactic-semantic changes performed by autonomous artificial 
agents justify the idea that we all need something to hide since privacy 
is not secrecy [following Slove] plus we are not empowered to control the 
flow of personal info and [lack of] decision diversity in an intrusive 
guided artificial agents scenario. 
 
 Bernardo Alonso - vomitols@gmail.com     //   ext@sdf.org