[yosamino]

This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect.

That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly.

All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.

[literallycancer]

And this is how it looks in the 3rd world.[1]

On 31 October, Congress party officials provided assailants with voter lists, school registration forms, and ration lists.[49] The lists were used to find the location of Sikh homes and business, an otherwise impossible task because they were located in unmarked and diverse neighbourhoods. On the night of 31 October, the night before the massacres began, assailants used the lists to mark the houses of Sikhs with letter "S".[49] In addition, because most of the mobs were illiterate, Congress Party officials provided help in reading the lists and leading the mobs to Sikh homes and businesses in the other neighbourhoods.[46] By using the lists the mobs were able to pinpoint the locations of Sikhs they otherwise would have missed.[46]

... One man, Amar Singh, escaped the initial attack on his house by having a Hindu neighbour drag him into his neighbour's house and declare him dead. However, a group of 18 assailants later came looking for his body, and when his neighbour replied that others had already taken away the body an assailant showed him a list and replied, "Look, Amar Singh's name has not been struck off from the list so his dead body has not been taken away."[46]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots#Use_of_vo...

[pessimizer]

And in the first world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

"The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million.[15]"

[tjalfi]

The US Census provided names and addresses for the Japanese internment.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-...

[DanielBMarkham]

Not only in alignment with some entity collecting the information, in alignment with every entity that might ever look at the information -- for the rest of your life.

[Bartweiss]

This is the strongest point. Not having anything you're ashamed of does not mean not having anything to hide - it's all too possible for completely harmless traits like ethnicity and sexuality to become targets for someone else.

[nkrisc]

Your actions may be legal now, but that may not always be the case. You may be protected from retroactive prosecution now, but that may not always be the case. Data doesn't just go away.

[pessimizer]

The most scary aspect is that if I know everything about you, I can frame you for a crime for which you will have no alibi, or threaten to in exchange for you doing what I ask.

The second was a tactic often used by the Stasi to create more operatives - call someone in for questioning, accuse them of a crime for which they have no alibi, such as spying, and when they protest their innocence, ask them to help the government with something to show their good faith. That something could easily be to provide a pretext for arresting the real target.

[DanielBMarkham]

The Stasi is a good model for how quickly and badly this can go off the rails.

The way it's supposed to work is that you have some public event of importance: a crime, a person applies for a security clearance, or whatnot. Based on that event, the state then conducts and investigation to see if there are any data they can discover that might lead to a response.

The new way of working is that you collect all the data, on everyone, all the time. Then there's no more event. The only thing you do is pick out the person. Once you have the person, it's a simple data mining exercise (along with a lot of interrogation techniques) that takes care of the person. What's the old saying in communist countries? "You have a man. You have a problem. No more man, no more problem"

Functional societies focus on events. Dysfunctional societies focus on the people.