"Privacy is only good because people aren't good. In a perfect world we wouldn't need privacy." Is that right?

Justin Park

In the digital age, concerns have been rising over privacy rights for decades. In the United States, for example, the rise of AI companies such as Palantir has triggered alarm over their potential to enable domestic surveillance. In refutation, an age-old argument has continued to resurface: “If you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.” But is this really true? 

American utopian communities seemed to think so. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, groups such as the Oneida and Shakers formed during a period of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. While they had differences, both required communal relationships over private romance, and used public confession to denounce personal sins and achieve spiritual perfection. However, it couldn’t last; in 1881, the Oneida Community dissolved into a joint stock company partially due to internal disagreements over its practice of polygamy, and the celibate Shakers have declined to almost no members today due to a lack of new recruits.

These communities and others like them often followed a pattern; despite efforts for complete, voluntary transparency and shared communal goals, they usually fell apart within decades. The reasons for their failures are unique to each example, but in general they include social infighting, or the inability to achieve self-sufficiency.

When examining internal disagreements, it is important to note that they cropped up between individuals with the shared goal of creating utopias. This brings up an interesting point: what is a utopia? These communities seemed to think it entailed complete social homogeny—where values and priorities were universal and shared—theoretically mitigating issues like greed, and rendering privacy obsolete. But is this truly a utopia? When such collectivization actually forces complete conformity, wouldn’t a society abandon all individuality as a result?

So even when relatively small groups of people with unified goals voluntarily give up their privacy, it often backfires. But this is only the most ideal scenario. In wider society, a lack of privacy has an even more disturbing track record.

Secret police have become synonymous with privacy violations; the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and KGB in the Soviet Union are well known for their domestic espionage, used to carry out arrests, torture, executions, deportations, purges, and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. But perhaps the most significant organization in terms of surveillance were the Stasi, who operated in East Germany during the Cold War. Using a combination of harassment and social isolation, they psychologically manipulated targets, while also using traditional methods like arrest, imprisonment, deportation, and executions. They had one full-time officer for every 166 citizens, but when factoring in its network of informants, they had one agent for every 6.5 East Germans. These methods helped them accumulate files on over a third of the country’s population by the fall of the Berlin Wall. In these instances and others, society-wide surveillance has been primarily used to further the interests of authoritarian regimes at the cost of civil rights, not to uphold the law or truly improve domestic security.

Both the utopian communities in America and totalitarian regimes in Europe bring up another interesting point: Why do we want privacy? Sometimes it's desirable for simple social reasons; maybe to hide something embarrassing from your family for example. Other times however, we use it to work against the interests of others. Of course this sometimes entails selfish crimes, but this isn’t always the case. Think of the French Resistance during the Second World War, which fought against Nazi control in occupied France. They were secretive by necessity, but one would be hard-pressed to argue that fighting against the Nazi regime was a bad thing.

It’s interesting that the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi kept their activities secret despite spying on their populations, because this is where the argument that “if you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to hide” falls apart. The only world where privacy is universally a bad thing is one where we are governed by completely benevolent ruling bodies, but this world is not the one we live in. Higher authorities such as governments have selfish interests that undermine those of others, and this will never change. Likewise, the common people also use privacy to pursue their own selfish interests. Yes, this leads to things like crime, but one side giving up their privacy entirely is not the solution. When the people do so, it leads to systematic terror and political repression, and the authorities obviously need to keep secrets as well. The real solution is finding a healthy balance. History shows that while targeting criminal organizations and watching suspicious individuals is nice, society-wide surveillance is usually detrimental. Likewise, the government should probably keep sensitive military information secret for security reasons, but increased transparency on domestic matters might be desirable. Privacy is a complex issue without simple solutions, and its values and limitations should be thoroughly considered before it’s thrown away on a whim.