Hackfest 2023 - Back to the Future

NOTH1NG T0 HID3
2023-10-14, 13:30–14:20, Track #2

This talk revisits the theme of personal privacy in the digital world, this time centring around the "I've got nothing to hide" argument. A beam of intensive light is shed on the motivation behind caring about one's privacy. We go in depth into what we can do to stay private and should we even try to do it at all. We talk about where we as an global society were able to fix privacy and where we have failed. New topics previously not covered are discussed, such as AI/LLMs.


  1. Confusion of the inverse logical fallacy (all criminal activity is hidden, so all that is hidden must be criminal).
    1a. Schrödinger's video camera
  2. Why is privacy important (actual rebuttals to "if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide")
    2a. Data hoarding → Blackmail, impersonation
    2b. Today’s authority might become totalitarian or inhumane
    2c. Herd immunity: many people not hiding anything, make the few stand out more and cause (misplaced) suspicion
  3. What do "normal people" have to say? What reactions have I've been getting since my previous version of the talk on a similar topic?
  4. Real examples of privacy nightmares.
    4a. China & Hong Kong (all the weird stuff)
    4b. Facebook (court rulings, suicide prevention algorithm)
    4c. EU (cookies, GPDR)
    4d. UK
  5. The end of end-to-end encryption
  6. Stories from the privacy zealot (How to achieve privacy and how much it cost me)
    6a. Mobile apps
    6b. IT certification exams
    6c. Airport scanners
    6x. more examples to follow
  7. Specific examples of where we were able to fix privacy
    7a. And where we failed (this is sadly larger than (6))
  8. Summary — do we fix it or what?

Are you releasing a tool? – No