This was a fun and also challenging article to write. I hope you will enjoy reading it.
You may have come across the I-have-nothing-to-hide argument as a response to concerns about digital mass surveillance. It’s a red herring; the real argument is about who gets to choose what to share.
This was written as a complement to The New Oil’s recent blog post about the I-have-nothing-to-hide argument. You can read that here:
TIL TNO moved to Ghost. I had the old website bookmarked.
But thank you for sharing your POV too. Interesting. Will have to think more on it.
And here’s a follow-up article on that same idea:
with reference to this ongoing discussion on PG: Why are so many privacy promoting people posting their personal data online? (@em @fria )
Great articles, thanks for sharing.
Between PQC and facial recognition technology, it’s surprising to me that anyone can’t rationally feel the invasiveness of knowing that photos you took 20+ years ago might now get retroactively tied directly to you if put online.
Case in point: I know someone that after high school did some modeling in the early 2000s, which (predictably) went risque. She stopped before it got any more exploitative than a few R-rated shoots, but the pictures were out there on the photographer’s site and she felt horribly ashamed about it for years afterwards, but largely put it behind her once she got married. Now, 25 years later, rather than that part of her life fading away into obscurity and her modeling pseudonym doing the hard work of making it hard to dig up that part of her life, she’ll likely one day have to explain all this to her kids because facial recognition will make it impossible to hide.
Sort of an extreme case, but the retroactive nature of old things that used to be obscured just enough now being fully retrievable really ought to freak people out more. Personally, I’m just expecting the PQC world to be awash in old password-protected zip files of tax documents from 2010 that can be cracked instantly and make everyone’s identities easily stolen. Maybe I’m just boring like that.
I totally agree!
Seems doubtful, as surely this is precisely why Tech Bros are so intent on making AI as realistic as possible. Who will be able to say what Sam Altman has done in his past when there are one bajillion Lumo generated videos of him also floating around? 
Except that Sam Altman is a public figure. For average people (and likely Millennials mostly hit this sweet spot of having been old enough for digital photos online without a thought to their permanence) no one is spamming the world with new AI images that look like 20 year old photos of someone’s mom on a photographer’s defunct website.
Which is entirely different than what young people face with deepfakes…ugh. Maybe this is a Millennial only problem 