[IlPeach]

I remember the time, about 6 or 7 years ago when I've asked in front of the whole class to the associate professor of the security course, whether building a text messages encryption app would have been a good idea as project for the course. The answer was a smickering "only a drug dealer would be interested in such a thing".

oh man, that hurt... if I only knew a valid point against the "I've got nothing to hide" argument as I do now...

[e40]

I've got nothing to hide

Got a handy link to that or similar arguments?

[networked]

How about something like this for the grandparent's case:

"In some countries people can be persecuted for their religious beliefs, politics or sexuality. Their text messages could potentially reveal all of the above to the government and/or someone listening in on GSM traffic [1]. Those people could use an SMS encryption app to provide them with plausible deniability or, should their local law doesn't have that notion, at least help them avoid automatic keyword detection."

[1] See, e.g., http://www.ti.bfh.ch/uploads/media/19_Vadym_Uvin.pdf.

[andy_boot]

I would tell anyone to watch the 'Lives of Others' - great film about how surveillance can be abused.

[tripzilch]

I keep this one bookmarked, for exactly that reason:

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

The problem seems to be, to me it's so obvious that it matters even if you have "nothing to hide", that whenever someone confronts me with that argument I'm a bit dumbfounded :)

[jcomis]

Your link is broken, but this one works: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...;

[tripzilch]

Fixed mine. Yours is broken in the same way :) Some weird escaping/encoding quirk going on there that seems to be caused by the trailing slash.

[IlPeach]

The essay is totally worth reading: gives probably the best definition of privacy I've seen and covers a good amount of use cases. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/privacy_and_th...