Nothing to hide is the most durable objection in this field, and it survives because it quietly redefines privacy as concealment of wrongdoing. What privacy actually is — contextual control over who knows what about you — and why every person making the argument already practises it.
The argument, put fairly
If you are doing nothing wrong, being observed costs you nothing — and objecting to observation suggests there is something to find.
It is intuitive, widely held, and usually offered sincerely by people who value transparency and distrust opacity. It puts the burden on whoever wants privacy to explain what they are keeping back, which feels like the right way round.
It deserves a proper answer rather than a sneer, because the sneer is what has kept it alive.
The definition it smuggles in
The argument treats privacy as the concealment of wrongdoing.
Grant that definition and the conclusion arrives immediately — which is the tell. When a conclusion follows that easily, the work was done by the definition rather than by the reasoning.
And it is a definition nobody applies to their own life, including the person offering it.
What privacy actually is
Control over what is known about you in which context.
What you tell a doctor, you do not tell an employer. What a close friend knows about a difficult year, a neighbour does not. What you would say in one room you would not say in another, and the difference is not that one version is dishonest.
None of that is wrongdoing. All of it is privacy. The information is not shameful; it is situated, and moving it between situations changes what it means and what it does to you.
The test that ends the conversation
Everybody making the argument closes the bathroom door. Uses an envelope rather than a postcard. Would object to their messages being read aloud in a meeting, and would not consider the objection an admission of anything.
That is not hypocrisy, and calling it hypocrisy is the mistake that loses the argument. It is evidence: the definition operating in their own life is the contextual one. They have never used the concealment definition for themselves, only for the abstract person they are imagining when they make the argument.
Why it persists anyway
Three reasons, none of them stupid.
Most people genuinely are not investigated, so the cost stays theoretical for a long time and the convenience is immediate.
The harms are delayed and diffuse while the benefits are now and concrete, which is a shape humans reliably misjudge in every other domain too.
And the costs fall hardest on people the person making the argument is not, which makes them easy to not notice rather than easy to dismiss.
Who actually pays
People whose ordinary behaviour gets read as suspicious because it is unusual.
People in circumstances they have not chosen to disclose — a relationship, a diagnosis, a debt, a departure.
People whose past will be read in a future context under rules that do not exist yet, which includes everybody but arrives unevenly.
And people in situations you cannot see from where you are, which is the whole category the argument is structurally unable to consider, since it reasons from one vantage point and generalises.
The version that does survive
There is a serious argument that some observation is worth its cost in specific, bounded circumstances, with oversight, with limits, and with somebody answerable for it.
That argument is real, and it is about proportionality — who decides, for how long, subject to what review, with what remedy when it is wrong.
It is a completely different argument from nothing to hide. Conflating them is how the weaker one borrows the stronger one's respectability, and separating them is most of what makes the conversation useful.
Close
The question was never what you are hiding. It is who gets to decide what is known about you, in which room, and for how long — which is a question everybody has already answered for themselves, in practice, whatever they say about it in the abstract.