Nothing to hide argument

The nothing to hide argument states that government surveillance programs do not threaten privacy unless they uncover illegal activities, and that if they do uncover illegal activities, the person committing these activities does not have the right to keep them private. Hence, a person who favors this argument may state "I've got nothing to hide" and therefore does not express opposition to government surveillance. An individual using this argument may say that a person should not have worries about government or surveillance if he/she has "nothing to hide."

The motto "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" has been used in the closed-circuit television program practiced in the United Kingdom.

This argument is commonly used in discussions regarding privacy. Geoffrey Stone, a legal scholar, said that the use of the argument is "all-too-common".Bruce Schneier, a data security expert and cryptographer, described it as the "most common retort against privacy advocates." Colin J. Bennett, author of The Privacy Advocates, said that an advocate of privacy often "has to constantly refute" the argument. Bennett explained that most people "go through their daily lives believing that surveillance processes are not directed at them, but at the miscreants and wrongdoers" and that "the dominant orientation is that mechanisms of surveillance are directed at others" despite "evidence that the monitoring of individual behavior has become routine and everyday".

An ethnographic study by Ana Viseu, Andrew Clement, and Jane Aspinal of the integration of online services into everyday life was published as "Situating Privacy Online: Complex Perceptions and Everyday Practices" in the Information, Communication & Society journal in 2004. It found that, in the words of Kirsty Best, author of "Living in the control society Surveillance, users and digital screen technologies", "fully employed, middle to middle-upper income earners articulated similar beliefs about not being targeted for surveillance" compared to other respondents who did not show concern, and that "In these cases, respondents expressed the view that they were not doing anything wrong, or that they had nothing to hide." Of the participant sample in Viseu's study, one reported using privacy-enhancing technology, and Viseu et al. said "One of the clearest features of our subjects’ privacy perceptions and practices was their passivity towards the issue." Viseu et al. said the passivity originated from the "nothing to hide" argument.

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