The Best Version of "I Have Nothing to Hide"

25 Feb, 2026

This post was last edited 1 month, 1 week ago.

In my last article, I Have Nothing but Red Herring to Hide, I grappled with the logic of arguments for and against online privacy. I got pretty close to stating strong versions for both the I-have-nothing-to-hide argument, as well as the simple argument for privacy. But as it turns out, these were not yet the best versions of those arguments.

If you read my last post you will know that I have a critical philosopher friend M. who loves picking apart flaws in logic. With new feedback on my last post, I can now present what are probably the best versions of the arguments on both sides. Thanks again to M. for the invaluable input; some of the words in the arguments below are his verbatim.

The best version of "I have nothing to hide"

My previous best version of what people mean when they say they are not worried about mass surveillance because they have nothing to hide was this:

If you have something to hide, then digital mass surveillance can negatively affect you
I have nothing to hide
∴ I am not negatively affected by digital mass surveillance

I cleverly (or so I thought...) pointed out that this line of reasoning is not logical, because, in logical reasoning, you can't deny the antecedent in a conditional statement such as

if [antecedent] then [consequent].

See my previous post or here for that line of reasoning.

However, I missed an obvious better version of that argument, namely:

If you have nothing to hide, then digital mass surveillance cannot negatively affect you
I have nothing to hide
∴ Digital mass surveillance cannot negatively affect me

The compounded negatives ('nothing,' 'cannot,' 'negatively') make my head spin a little and I can't help but wonder if there is a weakness there. Stylistically, I would try to avoid a double negation like 'cannot negatively,' which I did in my original example; however, M. assures me that from a logical perspective, the second version of the argument is completely sound.

That leaves me with a conundrum in terms of what I thought was my clever disputation of the I-have-nothing-to-hide argument, and it seems we are back to square one in terms of pointing out all the things are are wrong in the first premise in the statement above, as The New Oil did recently in this article, and as many others have done before him.

However, the main point of my previous post still stands, which is that the I-have-nothing-to-hide comment is a type of red herring, an argument that sounds relevant but actually takes us off course. I still stand by that.

The best version of the simple argument for privacy

Moving on from there, my own best version of the best argument for privacy was this:

My private information can be shared
My private information belongs to me by definition
∴ It should be me who decides whether or not to share my private information with others

Enter M. once again. Apparently, in logic, you cannot introduce new statements in the conclusion that are not mentioned in one of the preceding claims. In this case, I introduce the idea of decision making in the conclusion without any mention of it in the preceding premises.

A sound version of the argument looks like this:

My private information belongs to me
If something belongs to me, it should be me who decides whether or not to share it with others
∴ It should be me who decides whether or not to share my private information with others

That's definitely an argument I can live with.

The simple privacy argument in online discourse

I'm glad to see that same logic show up in various places online and in books where privacy is discussed, as, for example, in this discussion on the Privacy Guides forum this week, where fria, a member of the PG team, writes:

privacy is all about having control over what data goes where, not preventing all data from going anywhere.

and staffer Em writes:

Privacy is about keeping control over what information you want to share about yourself, or not. Everyone has different needs and threat models regarding what they feel comfortable sharing....This all come to personal choices. The important part is that people have all the information they need to make informed decisions, and have options to be able to only share what they wish to share.

This week, I also discovered the excellent shadowranch.xyz interactive educational tool (via the Hide & Speak privacy podcast), which includes quotes from early cypherpunks, such as this one:

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age... We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence."

and this one:

"Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."

These arguments are more relevant than ever today.

I recommend checking out the shadowranch.xyz interactive lessons, as well as Privacy Guides' own Knowledge Base for more information on the historical and current debate around privacy online!