Well, they're saying, “I don't have anything to hide”, but people have said that to me and I've said, “Show me your bank statement” and they get weirded out by it. People do have things to hide, but it's more a matter of the idea that when I wish to share a particular bit of information about me, I should have a choice.
For those who want to display their life online, the minutiae of their lives, that's their choice, but, to paraphrase Senator Simons, governments aren't always benevolent. I look to Hungary and Poland, but to Hungary in particular, which has changed in recent years to become rather authoritarian. Its data protection authority, which you would expect to have a role similar to that of our Privacy Commissioner, has ruled that the use of Pegasus against the country's journalists does not violate the law because there is a national security component.
Things that are okay today can be changed on a whim these days, used against you and taken out of context. That's nothing new; that's gone on from time immemorial, but we need to have the choice. Having our information or information about us gathered, taken, assembled, assessed and analyzed by someone we don't know, we've never met and we've never given permission to—what are they going to do with it?—means we're looking at McCarthy hearings again. It's frightening.
I've been around a long time and there's not a lot that scares me. What's going on now is frightening, and that's what people need to realize. It's not just benevolence.