Partial list destroying the ridiculous idea behind the statement “I have nothing to hide”:
Tell me everything about your finances. Tell me everything you’ve spent money on or thought about spending money on. Tell me every way you’ve made and lost money down to the fine details. Tell me your salary, your investments, and all of your liabilities.
Tell me everything about your health both physical and mental. Give me all the information on your health records and any health records that are known that you have about anyone else in your life.
Tell me everything about your sex life and your sexuality. Let me know your kinks, fantasies, history, and every other detail both salacious and mundane.
Tell me all your passwords, secret codes, and hiding places. Let me know all of the various ways and extent to which you’ve attempted to keep things secret and safe from others.
Tell me every time you have committed a federal crime including without really knowing the crimes you will be confessing to. To understand this point you need to understand that assuredly everyone has committed multiple federal crimes in their life, and most of these they are not aware of. It is true that many of these would be considered minor, but minor can be very major under the right circumstances. For example, lie to any federal agent such as the FBI about any federal crime (or tell any other lie, actually) and see what happens next.
Tell me your strengths and weaknesses in every capacity. Let me know your fears and aspirations. Tell me your plans for what you want to do next and how you’re going to go about doing it.
Now realize I’m going to use this in ways you can’t possibly imagine against you. I’m also going to share it at my own discretion and on my own timetable in ways that will be sometimes very public like social media and in other ways that will be very hidden and obscure such that you will have virtually no ability to counter it. I also will not necessarily be at all truthful or charitable with how I use this information.
Now suppose you’re in the six sigma category of openness and have no problem sharing any and all of the above. Suppose you are willing to stand naked (figuratively and literally) before the world. This still does not give you or anyone else the right to demand that the rest of us should conform to such as position or give up privacy. Whatever drives your knee-jerk reaction to justify government intrusion of this nature, likely an irrational fear of wrongdoers coupled with an unreasonable faith that the government would both use this information prudently and effectively against such wrongdoers, it is a point of view that deserves harsh scrutiny. Beyond being naïve, it enables much wrongdoing itself.
Across most margins, my privacy is worth more than your safety and much more than your desire to feel safe. Allowance for privacy invasion in the name of potential safety demands the strictest scrutiny not the least because invasions of privacy themselves lead to great, actual risks to safety.
Worried about non-governmental entities invading this privacy as well? Me too. But there are key distinctions between the government and private actors. There are legal limitations against people and firms including the right to sue them. They have reputational value at risk in ways the government is immune to. And they cannot bring the same threats and force against you.
Most of the privacy issues related to non-governmental actors are actually consensual. At times this consent is obscured by the private actors who indeed do use positions of asymmetric power against those they wish to gain information from and about. We have at our disposal many means by which to counter these, and it is a realm of continual, healthy debate. Not so for the government. For example, the users of a firm like, say, Google cannot determine that other users must yield information to Google. Neither can Google itself make such a determination. The government can and does empowered by those who make the audacious claim: “You shouldn’t fret if you have nothing to hide.”