Head Belly Root
Notes Privacy Is Hard Creative Commons License
Chapter 3

I've Got Nothing To Hide

  1. We will turn to a different deconstruction of the security versus privacy paradox in chapter 7, where we will argue that security and privacy are not a zero-sum game and that both can very well be achieved at the same time.
  2. D. J. Solove, "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy," San Diego Law Review, no. 44 (2007): 745.
  3. M. Martijn and R. Wijnberg, "Nee, je hebt wél iets te verbergen," De Correspondent, October 21, 2013.
  4. M. P. Lynch, "Privacy and the Threat to the Self," New York Times, June 22, 2013.
  5. M. Rasch, Zwemmen in de oceaan: Berichten uit een postdigitale wereld (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2017).
  6. R. Tate, "Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People," Gawker, April 12, 2009.
  7. S. A. Bent, Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men, 6th ed., Bartleby . com, 2012 (Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1887).
  8. J. Barbier, "Toen was pedofilie nog heel gewoon," De Volkskrant, April 11, 2014.
  9. See also the discussion on the difference between privacy and data protection in chapter 2.
  10. Kafka, Der Process.
  11. J. Holvast, "Een centraal Jodenregistratiesysteem maakte het zo erg," NRC, May 5, 2015.
  12. In fact, the US military used American Indians, native people who spoke languages that were literally unheard of outside of the United States, as a way to securely communicate by telephone in both world wars.
  13. Alice and Bob are the dramatis personae in almost every paper or presentation on security and cryptography, introduced by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in their seminal paper that announced the invention of RSA. See R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. M. Adleman, "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems," Communications of the ACM 21, no. 2 (1978): 120–126.
  14. D. Kahn, The Codebreakers (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
  15. Using the modern twenty-six letter Latin alphabet.
  16. S. Singh, The Code Book (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). The Code Book in fact was one of my inspirations to start writing about technology for people without a technological background.
  17. A. J. Menezes, P. C. van Oorschot, and S. A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1996); J. Katz and Y. Lindell, Introduction to Modern Cryptography, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2015); N. P. Smart, Cryptography Made Simple (Berlin: Springer, 2016); D. Boneh and V. Shoup, A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography.
  18. In general, the key can be shared with several people to create a secure broadcast channel, allowing each of the members to decrypt messages sent by any member. This would have allowed Caesar to send a single encrypted message that could be read by all of his generals.
  19. FIPS 46, Data Encryption Standard, NBS FIPS PUB 46 (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standards, US Department of Commerce, January 1977).
  20. FIPS 197, Advanced Encryption Standard, NIST FIPS PUB 197 (Washington, DC: National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce,
  21. J. Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: T. Egerton, 1813).
  22. This is why many people use a VPN in the first place. As we discussed in the previous chapter, your IP address is a good proxy for your location— most certainly for the country you live in. This is used by Netflix to determine which content you have access to. In many countries, TV shows streamed on the internet are only accessible to inhabitants of the country. The BBC, for example, only allows access to people that live in the United Kingdom. If you use a VPN provider with servers in the United Kingdom, then if you visit the BBC website over this VPN, the BBC will think you live in the UK (it sees the IP address of the VPN provider) and will offer you access to the latest episode of Blackadder. Conveniently, many VPN providers offer you the option to select a particular country for the VPN server you wish to use at a particular point in time.
  23. D. Johnson, "How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? It Might Be through YOUR Own Computer. Even If You've Never Used Disney+ or NordVPN," Medium, November 28, 2019.
  24. You may have heard of it by the name of its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
  25. Using the public key of the website, your browser could send encrypted mes- sages to it, but the web server would not have a way to respond to them because it doesn't have your public key. Nor would you want the server to have your public key as you prefer to be anonymous. So instead the browser and the web server agree on a shared secret communication key instead, using the web server public key to guarantee authenticity. This shared communication key, called the session key, is used to encrypt the messages in both directions via a symmetric cipher.
  26. For all practical purposes, that is. Website authentication is by no means foolproof.
  27. See https://signal.org.
  28. C. Meijer and B. van Gastel, "Self-Encrypting Deception: Weaknesses in the Encryption of Solid State Drives," in 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 19–23, 2019 (IEEE, 2019), 72–87.
  29. In Apple's terminology, this is called the class key and is derived from the UID and the user's passcode. See Apple Inc., Apple Platform Security (2020).
  30. If you use your fingerprint or face to unlock your device, the device key is not fully discarded but stored in a secure place within your device, from where it is released again when your fingerprint or face is successfully recognized.
  31. Wikipedia, "iCloud Leaks of Celebrity Photos," last modified May 31, 2020.
  32. But do note that collecting personal data is possibly a privacy infringement or a data-protection infringement even if all the data collected is openly accessible already. The mere fact that all this data is collected and combined in one place may create privacy risks. And the specific ways in which Google makes this data accessible and determines which results are returned for a search query and in which order are also a concern. In fact, this latter aspect underlies the infamous "right to be forgotten" verdict in the Google Spain case (Judgment of May 13, 2014, Google Spain, C-131/12 EU:C:2014:317).
  33. M. Hiltzik, "A Gerrymandering Attempt that Went Hilariously Awry [UPDATED]," Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2015.
  34. D. X. Song, D. A. Wagner, and A. Perrig, "Practical Techniques for Searches on Encrypted Data," in 2000 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE, 2000), 44–55.
  35. B. Fuller, M. Varia, A. Yerukhimovich, E. Shen, A. Hamlin, V. Gadepally, R. Shay, J. D. Mitchell, and R. K. Cunningham, "SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search," in 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE, 2017), 172–191.
  36. E. R. Verheul, B. Jacobs, C. Meijer, M. Hildebrandt, and J. de Ruiter, Polymorphic Encryption and Pseudonymisation for Personalised Healthcare, IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, report 2016/411 (2016).
  37. More complex data-sharing and analysis scenarios are certainly possible. In fact, a prototype implementing this technology is being piloted in the Personalized Parkinson Project (Parkinson op Maat). In this project, 650 patients are being monitored over a period of two years, and the data collected this way is shared, in pseudonymized form, with research institutes around the world. See, also the PEP project home page.
  38. I. Dinur and K. Nissim, "Revealing Information while Preserving Privacy," in Proceedings of the Twenty-Second ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Princi- ples of Database Systems, ed. F. Neven, C. Beeri, and T. Milo (New York: ACM, 2003), 202–210.
  39. A. Hundepool, J. Domingo-Ferrer, L. Franconi, S. Giessing, E. Schulte Nordholt, K. Spicer, and P.-P. de Wolf, Statistical Disclosure Control (West Sussex, UK: Wiley, 2012).
  40. A. Wood, M. Altman, A. Bembenek, M. Bun, M. Gaboardi, J. Honaker, K. Nissim, D. R. O'Brien, T. Steinke, and S. Vadhan, "Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non- technical Audience," Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 21, no. 1 (2018): 209–276.
  41. L. Kissner (@LeaKissner), "OK, here goes: a true story about social scientists, gay men, and differential privacy. Not so long ago in the US it was exceedingly difficult to figure out what %age of the population was gay. Being gay was subject to censure and prosecution." Twitter, April 4, 2019, 7:07 a.m..
  42. C. Dwork, "Differential Privacy," in Automata, Languages and Programming 2006, 33rd International Colloquium, ICALP 2006, ed. M. Bugliesi et al. (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 1–12; C. Dwork and A. Roth, "The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy," Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science 9, nos. 3–4 (2014): 211–407.
  43. Wood et al., "Differential Privacy"; Hundepool et al., Statistical Disclosure Control.
  44. See also this video by minutephysics on YouTube: minutephysics, "Protecting Privacy with MATH (Collab with the Census," September 12, 2019, YouTube video.
  45. For more references to information on differential privacy, see D. Desfontaines, "A Reading List on Differential Privacy," Ted Is Writing Things (blog), September 25, 2019.
  46. M. Fredrikson, E. Lantz, S. Jha, S. Lin, D. Page, and T. Ristenpart, "Privacy in Pharmacogenetics: An End-to-End Case Study of Personalized Warfarin Dosing," in 23rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Association, 2014), 17–32.