People with nothing to hide wouldn't be so opposed

People with nothing to hide wouldn't be so opposed is the classic comment made by authoritarian people and organisations every time they wish to extend their control over individuals.

While this is a fine sentiment, it ignores quite a lot of civil liberties problems with this statement, and how it is usually used.

For a start, it is almost always used to justify gathering of personal information about individuals that "might be usefull" at a later date. the problem with this one has to be the ignoring of the false positive rate that you get when they try and use this information for identification purposes. A simple case of this is looking in the DVLC database for all the green cars and who own them. They can find out that the car that they can put at the scene of the hit and run is registered to you, even though you sold it to a garage 3 years ago.

This raises another problem. To keep their databases up to date, they often require you to fill in countless forms. This is time consuming for you. The more forms you have to fill in, the longer it will take, and the more likelyhood of making a mistake. once you make that mistake, you can be prosecuted for providing misleading information. So you end up with a problem for incorrectly filling in some (usually badly specified) form for some information that they "might find usefull" at a later date.

Even if you manage to get the forms filled in correctly, you usually have to present them (or their end product) too often. Again this costs you time, and generally makes you life less simple. Again you can often be prosecuted for not being able to present the documents becouse they are on the coffee table at home, are have fallen behind the cupboard.

The only people you hear present this are those who generaly speaking don't trust people. You never hear this comment comming from the libertarian side of the debate.

Examples of people who use this comment include the American Polygraph Association
about polygraphs (which are notoriously unreliable), or the British Government about identity cards (which they regularly try and sneak past as being for some other fair reason) claiming that they will stop benefit fraud or driving while banned or that they will stop credit card fraud, etc.

While I am certain that the intentions are usually good, they completely miss the libertarians reply that all security measures are both intrusive, and only partially effective, while often being very expensive.

As an example of why the libertarians reasons for not liking the unnecessary collection and storage of data about them, how would you feel if your boss had the right to look at your home phone records, and your credit card records to see that you are not communicating with their competitors. This is just as "reasonable" as the other claims, but do you really want your boss to be able to find out which of his employees are talking to each other, eating at the same places at the same time, and then be able to fire you because someone at that meeting (on your own time) knew something that got leaked to their competitors (even if no one at the table even mentioned what was leaked). I thought not. This is just an example of the sort of problems that crop up if you allow this creeping encroachment upon your civil liberties.

See also a host of good update ideas that I haven't had time to add in the peer review thread.