[grosjona]

I think it's fine. If you did nothing wrong then you have nothing to lose by unlocking your phone. So if you don't unlock your phone, it's an admission of guilt.

People are way too paranoid. Nobody cares about what you do with your phone.

Sometimes I feel like the upper classes of society (especially hypocrites who have money and a reputation to protect) are projecting their fears on all other classes. Then like fools, the honest proletariat adopts all these ridiculous fears as their own.

[basilgohar]

I upvoted this comment not because I agree with this viewpoint, but specifically because I don't, and I want this to be seen by more people.

Whether this is an attempt at trolling or not, I am not sure, but I believe many people, especially those somewhat removed from marginalized populations, also hold this viewpoint.

I advise those that hold this viewpoint to see the excellent video, "Don't Talk to Cops". This should not be seen as an indictment of the many good people that work in law enforcement, but rather one of a system that incentivizes convictions over actual guilt or innocence.

At any moment in time, it we are breaking so many laws because of how the laws are written. It's illegal to speed. Who has never done that? A cop can pull you over. If the cop is having a bad day, and asks you to do something you don't want to, and you argue, now you're resisting arrest, which is another crime. And then for how many people has the next step been imprisonment and/or death due to an altercation that all started from a thing nearly everyone does almost every day?

The government does not need more powers to find more people guilty of crimes that shouldn't even be illegal. There are already too many people in jail and too many people dead due to a justice system that, sadly, skews far away from actual justice.

[sjcsjc]

https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE

[ajuc]

> If you did nothing wrong then you have nothing to lose by unlocking your phone

What's right and wrong changes every few decades. Not too long ago a guy was jailed and pushed to suicide because he was gay. In UK.

There are countries today, where you can be put in a concentration camp for being gay (Chechnya Republic in Russia).

There are people that had to escape USA because they warned people of government institutions abusing the law (see Snowden for 1 example).

There are people killed in Mexico for protesting against drug cartels and corruption in government protecting them.

Liberal and paceful France sent spies to put a bomb and explode ecologists' ship that was protesting against nuclear tests in international waters. Later New Zaeland caught the spies, and France blackmailed them to release the spies threathening war.

It's pretty common for nice democratic governments to do EVIL things. It's even more common for non-democratic, or non-liberal governments to do that. Most of the time you're fine, because government ignores most people. But the law is concerned with protection of the few that wouldn't be fine.

> So if you don't unlock your phone, it's an admission of guilt.

Even medieval inquisition had higher standards than that. They tortured people, but at least they required them to admit the crime. You don't even want that. Congratulations.

[coldtea]

>People are way too paranoid. Nobody cares about what you do with your phone.

Perhaps others' lives are too uneventful. In these here parts of Western Europe we had 3 dictatorships active within the last 50 years (up to ~1980 -- Spain, Portugal, Greece), including torture and everything. Easter Europe had worse up to 1989. All could come back quite easily.

And even in other parts of Western Europe there was mass surveillance of political opposition, lots of cases against activists, hundreds of thousands of people against the political establishment (e.g. in Italy), mafia, etc.

Not everywhere is like rural Iowa.

[cromulent]

If the world needs to be more transparent, then I think it should start with the Australian politicians. Give us access to their phones and computers, give us CCTV in their offices. Then we can be sure that no crimes are being committed, that no corruption takes place. They are, after all, working for us.

[jedberg]

Please post your email password here so we can all take a look. If you've doing nothing wrong then you would have no problem with that right?

[johndough]

If you have the data from breaches listed on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ you can already get access to some of his passwords (not tested of course). It seems like the "nothing to hide"-philosophy has also been applied to the password complexity.

I'd strongly recommend to use secure passwords and maybe a password manager. Further, I'd recommend using different aliases and email addresses for different websites, or at least keeping email addresses private where possible.

[jasonbarrah]

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hie is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -E. Snowden

[tormeh]

And actually, most people have nothing to say. See China, for an example. Most people want peace, security and to create a home in which to raise children. They care, but not very strongly, for the rights of minorities the environment and other things you might need freedom of speech to advocate. Freedom of speech and civil liberties are luxuries that can be sacrificed, as we see each time a new dictatorship is cheered forward by the masses. Most people are not idealistic, and have higher priorities than freedom.

If we want to preserve these rights we can't just appeal to their utility for the individual.

[grosjona]

I disagree with that statement because they have fundamentally different purposes.

Free speech affects my ability to improve society. Right to privacy affects my ability to cover my own ass.

[ajuc]

Free speech in a country that goes authoritarian is very harmful for your career. People in power have connections, they can make it hard for you to make a living without even breaking the law, just asking the right people for a favor. Anonymity is one of the things that make people more likely to say what's need to be said.

Without protection of privacy - very few people will exercise their free speech when things get hard.

[grosjona]

Maybe these types of people would not have power if everyone knew who they really where.

That said I understand people who are afraid that loss of privacy would be asymmetric but I don't think that would happen. Celebrities and public figures will always have less privacy than everyone else.

[ajuc]

> I understand people who are afraid that loss of privacy would be asymmetric but I don't think that would happen

If Trump wants to know your tax returns - he will. You don't know his, no matter how much you want to.

And anyway, Trump insist he could murder someone and give himself a pardon. You can't. So, even if the information flow is symetric - the consequences aren't.

[cromulent]

Sure, but his point was that you don't give up rights to the government simply because you have no use for them. Other people do. If you don't defend them, they get eroded and society regresses. History shows us this.

[type0]

It's still about the basic human dignity, you loose it once you don't have free speech or the right to privacy. Would you feel dignified if you were forced to go around with a huge hole in your pants without the ability to "cover your ass"?

[packet_nerd]

> Right to privacy affects my ability to cover my own ass.

Actually this isn't the most important reason for privacy.

Privacy and other basic rights do very little for me as an random law-abiding dude. I don't break laws, so don't have any reason to cover my ass. I don't have much to say, so not being allowed to express my opinion doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Even in the doomsday scenario where evil totalitarian dictator takes over the country and mass-surveils everyone and otherwise stomps on our rights, it probably won't be that big a deal to lowly me.

The most important reason for protecting individual privacy is to protect the future of society and civilization itself. The average dude in Nazi Germany and Pol Pot era Cambodia probably barely noticed his loss of individual rights as far as daily life was concerned. Mass surveillance enables mass control, and the worst atrocities in history have all happened in environments where individual rights - including privacy - were disregarded. It's bigger than just me. It's about protecting society itself and giving my children a decent world to live in.

[jonknee]

> Nobody cares about what you do with your phone.

Well it sounds like the Australians who will put you in a cage for 10 years for not unlocking your phone very much do care what you do with it...

[somebodythere]

Refusing to unlock your phone isn't an admission of guilt. It's just being smart when you know your legal system regularly engages in parallel construction and fishing expeditions.

[crooked-v]

> If you did nothing wrong

Everyone has done something wrong, often to the point of theoretically being felonies.

https://mic.com/articles/86797/8-ways-we-regularly-commit-fe...

[EliRivers]

So if you don't unlock your phone, it's an admission of guilt.

I understand the evidence indicates that some people do choose not to unlock their phones on demand by police, even when they are innocent. You can interpret that as an admission of guilt if you like; this puts you in the same moral boat as police who write up a confession for someone and then fake their signature, because they just know the guy is guilty.

You can say what you think all you like, but the evidence is against you.

[jasonlotito]

> If you did nothing wrong then you have nothing to lose by unlocking your phone.

This is provably not true. In fact, you need to come up with evidence proving that there is NOTHING to lose by unlocking your phone.

[okreallywtf]

This feels like satire, I don't believe this person is being genuine.

[dsfyu404ed]

Was this meant as a joke?