The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

I get my gas and electricity from Scottish Power. Recently a rival company, Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute. The front line of defence against this kind of dispute is that the bills give the serial numbers of the meters. The bill from Scottish Power gives the same meter serial numbers that are embossed on the front of my meters, and is therefore valid. The bill from Ovo Energy gives different serial numbers and is therefore in error.

Picture though the internal processes in Ovo Energy. A second clerk is tasked with attending to the problem. He has a choice. He can change the address to agree with the meter serial numbers, correcting the error. Or he can change the meter serial numbers to those for my address, compounding the error.

Since the meter serial numbers are confidential, to me and Scottish Power, Ovo Energy does not have the second option; they do not know the serial numbers (which are long, like a credit card number, not just 1,2,3,...). Thus the clerical error gets corrected, or just left, but not compounded.

My guess is that confidential information, (such as meter serial numbers, credit card numbers, and account numbers), are the front like of defence against both clerical error and fraud based on impersonation. It is a rather weak defence, but it is light weight, and seems to how much of billing and billing disputes work.

We all have lots to hide: the confidential information that the system needs us to keep confidential to stop clerical errors from compounding.

All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters.

Fraudsters often get their hands on government data through breeches and bribery.

Also fraudsters pretend to be government agents to get data from big tech companies. So any channel that governments use to get data from tech companies is abused by fraudsters to commit crime.

Fraud is a very big deal. The UK economy loses 219 billion per year to fraud. Our national deficit payment is 93 billion per year and we spend 188 billion on the NHS.

If we improved privacy of all of our citizens then the savings from fraud reduction would cover our entire government deficit

Already there friend.

I feel that I have nothing to hide, but I do my darnedest to ensure that it costs a maximal amount of time and effort to find that out.

If a random stranger (law enforcement or otherwise) wants to know shit about me, then I'm immediately creeped out and the last thing I want to do is make (online) stalking of me an easy task. The harder it is, the more likely they'll give up and move on to someone else (pending their reasons).

As it should be for everyone.

Edited to add: One thing I can tell you from experience: law enforcement only look for things that will confirm their suspicions. They do not look for counter evidence, no matter how obvious it is or how easy it is to find - even within government records to which they would already have access.

As such, beware what trail you leave, if it suits the right (wrong) agenda, it will be used to point in the worst possible direction.

We are stopping corruption here, so only corrupt people could oppose such decision and they should be immediately investigated.

(I think I first might have come across this beautifully succinct and unfortunately very true counter in a Reddit AMA with Edward Snowden way back when, but I might be misremembering.)

so now comes the question...

"How much do you trust a human, despite being your favourite?".....

We need to learn about 'trust' and its role in our lives!

Information is power! And 'trust' me, you don't want to give it to anyone over you!

The upcoming era of transparency will come in the form of compliances (or, chains) you will never withdraw yourself from! Surely facility and security will baited for this!

Also, with the rise in the fields of biotech and nano-tech, infused with A.I., they are preparing us to be their 'lab rats', and they don't need our consents! We shouldn't be ignoring this at all!

Large surveillance systems inevitably build baselines. They don't just detect crimes; they detect patterns and anomalies relative to whatever becomes "normal".

The problem with "nothing to hide" is that it defaults to maximal disclosure. Data is persistent, aggregatable, and reinterpretable as norms and regimes change. The data doesn't.

This isn't purely individual. Your disclosures can expose others through contact graphs and inference, regardless of intent. And it doesn't matter whether the collector is the state or a company; aggregation and reuse work the same way.

There are at least some people who would respond by (still) saying "I have nothing to hide." They are proud of their moral choices and confident in their convictions. Arrest them if you dare.

I wonder if the author still has contempt for them?

- Sure, but why are you closing the door when taking sh*? Is your sh*ing somehow special?

I'm well aware of the possible and even unavoidable consequences of the current trajectory.

But this is a conscious decision to try to shape the norm so that the current dystopian zillionaire future would not happen fully.

My reasoning is most likely the humanely typical post-hoc rationalization and strategic reasoning, but I try to think good old MLK quote fits it.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"

Their argument is a "pathology of the present tense," a failure of imagination so profound it borders on a moral crime. What they fail to understand is that by living as an open book, they are creating the most dangerous weapon imaginable: a baseline of "normalcy." They are steadily creating a data profile for the State's machine, teaching its algorithms what a "good, transparent citizen" looks like. Every unencrypted text, every thoughtless search, every location-tagged post is another brick in the wall of their own cage.

And then comes the part they can't (or won't) fathom. The context shifts. The political winds change. The Overton window slams shut on a belief they once held. A book they read is declared subversive. A group they donated to is re-classified as extremist. A joke they told is now evidence of a thoughtcrime. Suddenly, for the first time, they have something to hide.

So they reach for the tools of privacy. They download the encrypted messenger. They fire up the VPN. They start to cover their tracks.

And in that single act, they trigger the Deviancy Signal.

Their first attempt at privacy, set against their own self-created history of total transparency, is a screaming alarm to the grown surveillance machine. It's the poker player with a perfect tell, or the nocturnal animal suddenly walking in daylight. Their very attempt to become private is the most public and suspicious act they could possibly commit. They have not built an effective shield, as they have painted a target on their own back. By the time they need privacy, their own history has made seeking it an admission of guilt.

But the damage doesn't end with your own self-incrimination. It radiates outward, undoing the careful work of everyone around you. Think of your friend who has practiced perfect operational security, who has spent years building a private life to ensure they have no baseline for the state to analyze. They are a ghost in the machine. Then they talk to you. Your unshielded phone becomes the listening device they never consented to. You take their disciplined effort to stay invisible and you shout it into a government microphone, tying their identity to yours in a permanent, searchable log. You don't just contrast with their diligence; you actively dismantle it.

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state's pool, making any ripple of dissent ... any deviation ... starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.

There is only one way to disarm this weapon: we must destroy its premise. We must obliterate the baseline. The task is not merely to hide, but to make privacy the default, to make encryption a reflex, to make anonymity a universal right. We must create so much noise that a signal is impossible to find. Our collective goal must be to make a "normal" profile so rare that the watchers have nothing to compare us to. We must all become deviations.

To think, "no presence" = no problems. If I were a dumb machine, I just might decide to pick up all citizens with birth certs that are also internet ghosts. What was the point then?

What really matters is judiciary due process and the legitimacy of a government.

Companies are the ones gathering data, it's not the government doing it.

Before the internet, governments already had data on their citizens.

The internet makes it more difficult for the government to catch criminals and fraudsters.

If you live in Russia or China or under Trump's administration, there are good reasons to hide.

If you live in a country where freedoms and due process are respected, there is no point in hiding, UNLESS you can really argue that due process and freedoms are eroding, but that's a different debate.