Nothing to Hide? Then Why Draw the Curtain?

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You do nothing illegal at home. So why do you close the bathroom door, why do you leave your phone face down on the table? Everyone who says "I have nothing to hide" does the opposite dozens of times a day — and the real question is whether a person being watched is still the same person.

Picture a building. At its centre stands a tower, and around the tower, rising in a ring, floor upon floor of cells set side by side. Every cell has two windows: one looking outward, letting the light in; the other looking inward, toward the tower. The light coming from outside fills the cell from end to end, and the body of the person inside falls toward the tower like a figure in a shadow play. In the tower there are curtains, blinds, corridors laid out at broken angles. The man in the tower can see the man in the cell. When the man in the cell looks at the tower, all he sees is darkness.

The person who described this building was Jeremy Bentham, in letters he wrote in 1787 while staying with his brother in Russia. He had it in mind for prisons, factories, hospitals, schools. He called it the Panopticon, that is, the place that sees everything. Bentham's invention was not really the architecture; the architecture was only the vehicle. The invention was this: for surveillance to be effective, it does not have to happen. There does not have to be anyone in the tower. It is enough that the person in the cell knows there could be someone in the tower and can never find out whether there is. Bentham described this as a new way of obtaining power of mind over mind. The cost was low. One watchman, hundreds of cells. Sometimes no watchman at all.

In 1975 Michel Foucault returned to this design in his book Discipline and Punish and turned it from a building into a formula. Foucault's sentence was this: visibility is a trap. Because a person who is permanently visible eventually takes the mechanism that watches him inside himself. He sits up straight even on the nights when there is nobody in the tower. There is no chain, no whip, no punishment; there is the possibility of punishment, and that possibility works more cheaply and more continuously than punishment itself. The prisoner becomes his own guard. Power no longer looks for a hand to apply it; the thing that does the work is the possibility of being watched.

Do not take this for an abstract French idea. Think of the black plastic half-dome on the ceiling of the supermarket. Is there a camera inside it, and if there is, where is it pointing, is it working, who watches the recording, how long is it kept? You do not know. It was designed so that you cannot know. If you have pulled your bag a little higher on your shoulder while walking under that dome, then even though you have stolen nothing, you are inside Bentham's building. Think of the speed-camera sign at the roadside. Your foot comes off the accelerator even on the days when there is no device behind the sign. Think of the open-plan office: it was said that productivity rises when the walls come down; what came down was not the wall, but what was behind it.

And now the real question. You have committed no crime. There is nothing stolen in your pocket, your speed is under the limit, there is nothing on your screen to hide. So why does the way you walk change under that dome? Why, when you notice someone looking at your phone over your shoulder, do you tilt the screen slightly away? What you are doing is not shameful. It is not forbidden. It is nothing to be embarrassed about. And yet being looked at changes the thing being done. If what changes is not a crime, then what is it?

The sentence "I have nothing to hide" looks innocent. It even looks virtuous. It carries within it a claim to openness, to honesty. But this sentence is not an answer; it is a concession. What it concedes is this: privacy is the covering of wrongdoing. A curtain is needed only if there is a fault behind it. Once you have made that concession, the argument is over; all that remains is to determine who is at fault, and you are not the one who makes that determination.

Yet almost none of the curtains in your life cover a fault. You close the bathroom door. What you are doing is not a crime, everyone does it, it is biology. Still you close it. You put your letter in an envelope; there is no state secret inside it. You do not tell your colleague your salary; you did not earn it by theft. You do not tell your boss what you tell your doctor; what you are telling is the same thing, and the only element that changes is who is listening.

The philosopher James Rachels untied this knot in an article he wrote in 1975. Privacy is not the destruction of information; it is choosing where information flows. The only way we are able to have different relationships with different people is by giving them different amounts of ourselves. The difference between your spouse and your colleague is not only that you work with one and live with the other; it is that one of them knows what the other does not. In a world where everyone knows everything, there is no separate thing left called friendship. Nor is there love. Because the meaning of sharing comes from the possibility of not sharing. When you lift the curtain, what you lose is not the thing you were concealing, but closeness.

The criterion Helen Nissenbaum set out in 2010 gives this a name: contextual integrity. A piece of information is not in itself private or public; the violation arises when it passes from one context into another. The result of your blood test is medicine in the hands of your doctor, a price in the hands of the insurance company, a risk in the hands of your employer, gossip in the hands of your neighbour. The information is the same information. What leaks is not a secret, but a flow. This is why the "I have nothing to hide" argument asks the wrong question. The question is not whether the information is embarrassing; it is where it goes.

The legal scholar Daniel Solove, in an article from 2007 that takes up precisely this argument, says the surveillance debate is being conducted with the wrong novel. Everyone thinks of Orwell, of an eye looking down from above, of the telescreen. But the true counterpart of contemporary surveillance is Kafka's novel The Trial. Josef K. is arrested one morning; he cannot learn what his crime is, cannot see his file, cannot find out who made the decision, cannot find the place where he might defend himself. Nobody shouts at him, nobody beats him. There is simply a file about him, and he has no access to it. This is today's problem: a file is accumulating about you that you cannot see, cannot correct, cannot object to. Every single piece of data inside it is innocent. Where you go, what you search for, who you talk to, what you buy, what time you wake up and what time you go to sleep. Taken one by one, none of it is a crime. What emerges when they are lined up side by side is more than what you know about yourself.

Then there is the practical test of the argument. The journalist Glenn Greenwald describes a simple offer he makes to people who say "I have nothing to hide": in that case, send me the passwords to your email addresses, and I will go through your accounts and publish whatever I find interesting. Nobody has ever accepted this offer. Edward Snowden gathers the same contradiction into a single sentence: not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. A right protects you not because you use it, but because it exists.

And the most fragile point of the argument stands at the very end. The sentence "if I am not doing anything wrong, I have nothing to fear" assumes that what counts as wrong stays fixed. But you are not the one who makes that definition. A belonging, an opinion, a friendship, a search history that is ordinary today may be read quite differently within another framework ten years from now. The record is permanent; the criterion is not. What you are relying on as you defend yourself is not your innocence, but the present mood of whoever is measuring you.

This objection has a far older form, and the interesting thing is this: the tradition that put it forward is a tradition that draws an extremely sharp line between right and wrong. Even so, and perhaps for exactly that reason, it forbids searching.

The twelfth verse of the Hujurat chapter of the Qur'an forbids three things one after another: most kinds of suspicion, tecessüs, and backbiting. The middle word, tecessüs, means roughly "to go after someone's hidden affairs, to search out their faults". Notice that what is forbidden is not seeing a fault, but looking for one. The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth verses of the Nur chapter come right down to the door of everyday life: do not enter other people's houses without permission and without greeting them; if you find no one inside, do not enter until permission is given; if you are told to go back, then go back. In the hadith literature that grew up around these verses, even the etiquette of knocking at a door is set out in detail: you do not stand directly in front of the door, you stand to one side, so that when the door opens the eye does not fall straight into the house. There are reports that count looking into a house without permission as a violation as grave as entering it.

The word itself is also worth looking at. In Turkish, when we say "mahrem", what usually comes to mind is shame. Yet the root of the word is the same as the root of the words "haram", "hürmet", "harem" and "ihram", and it describes an area that is protected by respect, made inviolable. The reason the area around the Kaaba is called the Haram is not that there is something shameful there. Mahrem is not an ugliness that must be concealed; it is a dignity with a fence around it. The curtain is not the covering of a shame, but the mark of a boundary.

A report often quoted in the commentaries brings this distinction onto the stage. The caliph Umar, walking through the city at night, hears a sound from a house, climbs over the wall and goes inside, and finds the man in a forbidden state. "You think you have disobeyed God," he says. The man answers: "Commander of the Faithful, if I have disobeyed in one thing, you have disobeyed in three. God said do not search, and you searched. He said enter houses by their doors, and you climbed the wall. He said ask permission and give greeting, and you did not ask permission." Umar falls silent, leaves the man and goes out. The critical point of the report is not that the man is proved right; it is that the caliph's wrong is described as a wrong of method. There was an offence. The existence of the offence did not make the method of finding it legitimate.

Al-Ghazali, in the Ihya, dealing with the question of commanding right and forbidding wrong, turns this boundary into a rule: intervention can be directed only at what is manifest, that is, at what has become visible of its own accord. To sniff, to listen, to climb a wall, to plant a spy in someone's house in order to learn what lies behind a closed door is not permissible. The same tradition has a positive face to this as well: setr, that is, covering over. The hadith saying that whoever covers the fault of a believer will have his own fault covered has produced a social reflex. Not spreading what you have seen has been counted a virtue. In short, there are two separate commands here, and both look in the same direction: do not search, and do not tell what you have found.

This principle turned into stone and timber in the Ottoman city. The house plan closed to the street and opening onto a courtyard; the latticed windows of the bays that jut out over the street; the high walls dividing the gardens. The lattice is there not to cut the woman inside off from the world, but to establish a one-way line of sight: from inside, the street is visible; from the street, the inside is not. An asymmetry that is the exact opposite of the Panopticon. More striking still is that this became a matter for litigation in the registers of the kadis. A complaint is brought against a person who has opened a window looking onto a neighbour's courtyard or window; the rulings given most often involve closing the window, raising it, or placing a curtain or a lattice in between. That is, privacy is not a value to be prayed for, but a right that can be claimed in court. And the answer to the claim is, in the literal sense of the word, a curtain.

So the answer to the "if you are doing nothing wrong, do not be afraid" argument comes into view. This tradition accepts that wrongdoing exists; it even describes it in the clearest terms. But it also counts the gaze itself as an act. The issue is not whether you are innocent; it is whether the one who looks has a limit. A limitless gaze ruins something even where it finds no crime.

Now put the glass in your pocket where that latticed window used to be.

Nobody climbed a wall. Nobody forced a door. You gave permission. While installing the application you ticked the box at the end of the text that appeared, you pressed the blue button that said "I accept", and in that moment you legally gave consent. So what did you read? Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University calculated that if an internet user actually read the privacy texts they encounter in the course of a year, it would take about 76 working days. 76 working days a year. Calling the approval given to a text that nobody reads, and that nobody is expected to read, consent is a polite lie the law tells itself. An experiment carried out in London in 2014 turned this into a bitter joke: a clause was added to the terms of a hotspot offering free wireless internet, stating that the user was handing over their first-born child for ever. Within a few hours 6 people signed it.

In Turkey, Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data came into force in 2016; similar regulations arrived in Europe. These texts bring real rights: the right to access your data, to correct it, to demand its deletion. But what changed everyday experience was most often this: a box that appears on every site, for which accepting is the shortest way of closing it. Consent turned less into a choice than into a turnstile. In the Cambridge Analytica affair that came to light in 2018, it was stated that the data of as many as 87 million users had been reached through a small personality-quiz application. The overwhelming majority of those 87 million people had never taken any quiz. It was enough that someone on their friend list had taken it. That was the strangest side of consent: somebody else had clicked on your behalf.

The real injustice of this arrangement is not that data is collected, but that the direction runs one way. You are transparent, the system is opaque. You cannot find out what is accumulating about you, what score you have been labelled with, why you see this advertisement and not that loan. The inside of the tower is dark, the cell is lit. Bentham's drawing, four centuries later, has been built without anyone being forced.

But does nothing really change for the person who does nothing? The legal scholar Jonathon Penney examined the view counts of Wikipedia articles related to terrorism after the surveillance revelations of 2013, and found a lasting drop in visits to those articles; the rate was about 20 percent. Nobody had been arrested. Nobody had been fined. No ban had been issued. People had simply stopped being curious. This is the measurable form of Foucault's sentence: the prisoner became his own guard. And what was lost was not one person's crime, but the space in which all of us learn.

What is more, the issue is no longer even the recording of the past. In the order described by Shoshana Zuboff in her study The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019, the value of data lies not in showing what you have done, but in predicting what you will do. Your clicks, what time you go to sleep at night, how long you spent on a message you wrote and did not send, how many seconds you watched a given video; these produce not an archive about you, but a model. That model is sold. The product is not the advertisement you watch; it is the forecast of your future behaviour. The man in the tower of the Panopticon is no longer watching you. He is calculating you.

And here is where the real answer to the question of the curtain lies. Erving Goffman, in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959, divides life in two like a stage: front stage and back stage. On the front stage we play a role; you are a teacher, a doctor, a father, a civil servant. Backstage we put the role down; the tie is loosened, the sentence is left half-finished, things are rehearsed, mistakes are made, things are given up. What Goffman is really saying is this: the back stage is not the place of dishonesty, it is the condition that makes the front stage possible. There is no performance without a rehearsal.

For a person to be able to change, they need a room in which they are not seen. A place where they can get an idea wrong and then correct it, delete a half-finished sentence, give up tomorrow what they defend today, be curious without answering to anyone. A person whose every moment is recorded does not try anything new, because the cost of trying is permanent. A person whose every sentence is archived does not change their mind, because the change is read back to them as inconsistency. In such a life a person does not make mistakes, but neither do they ripen. The price of surveillance is not being caught; it is freezing.

When evening comes, you draw the curtain. There is no crime inside. On most evenings there is not even a secret; there are the dishes, the television, tiredness, a half-finished conversation. That curtain is not a confession, and it is certainly not a lie. That curtain is the drawing of a boundary: this is mine, and whoever wants to look in here asks permission. And when that line is removed, what you lose will not be the things you were hiding. It will be the idea that a person with nothing to hide also has a room.

Nöron Philosophy'de bugünkü bölümün sonuna geldik. Yeni bir hikâyede yeniden buluşmak üzere.