Edward Snowden:
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It is the foundation of a healthy society.
Human rights don’t exist without privacy. Freedom of the press depends on the protection of the communication of journalists and their sources, who may need to maintain anonymity to avoid retaliation. That cannot be achieved without tools like Tor. Without a free press, it’s hard to pressure the government to do what is good for the people, because we can’t expose wrongdoings and publicly criticize their actions.
Without proper technical safeguards (like end-to-end encryption and minimizing data collection), everyone is at risk of their data getting leaked or stolen by cybercriminals.
Without secure communication channels, people in vulnerable situations (like victims of domestic violence) will not feel comfortable reaching out for help, which will cause the abuse to continue.
Mass surveillance is inherently linked to government overreach. The initial goal is to combat threats like terrorism, organized crime, or child abuse. What ends up happening is that the measures introduced are ineffective at the task they were meant for while allowing censorship, false accusations of crimes, spying on political activists, and other risks to the general public.
When we require backdoors to various systems that are meant to be used by authorities of one country, there’s a high chance they’ll eventually be exploited by another, hostile country or regular cybercriminals. There is not such a thing as a backdoor only for the good guys.
Everyone has sensitive use cases. People use technology to communicate with their doctor, lawyer, or accountant. It’s unreasonable to portray security tools like Signal or Proton as something dangerous and used only by nefarious actors.
Companies having a large amount of data on their users can utilize that data to target ads, design addictive algorithms, and manipulate the user. It can cause you to have a skewed view of the world, develop mental health issues, or buy things you don’t need. The data can be used for purposes such as automatically raising the prices for specific users or unjustly denying access to services.