Government: Stop Peeking at Us! Do you know that our government is spying on us? According to a report by Washington’s Blog, our government spies on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses and all other things that our life is based on these days. Some people might say that they have nothing to hide; however, this argument of “nothing to hide” is actually suggesting that the thing that people try to hide is bad. Privacy matters because it belongs to the man who owns it. It’s a part of him/her, which is not allowed to be exposed. Privacy matters because it varies between people; it should not be used against the owner as well as it cannot be used for other purpose. Privacy created clothes for our thinking, allowing government to collect our privacy is equivalent to let them peek our thinking. I don’t agree with the argument that people has nothing to hide because privacy is a personality, the possibility of overpower our government and the risk of improper secondary use. First of all, I do not support the argument that people has nothing to hide about because privacy is who we are, a personality as well as a human right. Privacy is subjective, that means that it varies as people changes. So there is nothing that is absolutely private or anything that is definitely public. In the article “Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have “Nothing to Hide”,” Solove states that the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things (343). Furthermore, he says that surveillance can inhibit such lawful activities involve freedom, and the most important, it violates first amendment rights that is essential for democracy. In my opinion, there are different kinds of privacy; for instance, there are secrets that we do not want others to know; there are things that we only want someone to know, nevertheless, there may be things that are bad and don’t want law enforcement to know. But massive surveillance sacrifices other aspects of privacy to focus on “bad ” privacy. What’s more, the reason why I do not support the argument is because the possibility of overpowering our government. Collecting data on citizens gives our government a method, a power, a tool to control us whenever they want. This kind of problem is called Kafkaesque. In Solove’s essay:
The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problem caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing---the storage, use, or analysis of data---rather than of information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. (Solove 343)
What this means is that with all this collected data, our government can overpower us. But why should our government be given that kind of power, that it can control its citizen rather than server them? In a famous movie “V for Vendetta,” there is a famous quote “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” It is also true for privacy. People should have privacy but government cannot, after all, government should do what it is said in the definition: a branch or service of the supreme authority of a state or nation, taken as representing the whole, servicing for all. Beside the problem of Kafkaesque, the risk of secondary use of the collected information is also a reason why I refuse the argument that people has nothing to hide about. We have no guarantee than the government won’t use the collected data other than “detect terrorism.” Government is where management of a whole country is taken place, however, there is neither a person nor an institution that oversees the government; so no one can ensure that improper secondary use will not occur. This is also being argued in the essay:
Secondary use is the exploitation of data obtained for one purpose for an unrelated purpose without the