My interpretation is that it is an argument against trust in authority in privacy discussions.

A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.

The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.

I always look at this from the other side...

Side A abuses (legal, governmental) power, and instead of "lynching" them for that, we turn the issue into "this will become bad only because of side B will do the same". To me it looks like someone supports side A, and wants to limit the "badness" of whatever they did, but still can't support the thing, so they find the way out by claiming that the other side will do something bad with that data, as if the collecting the data (chats,...) isn't bad enough by itself.

I understand your analogy with friends and facebook, and explaining that stuff to your grandma in this way would probably work... maybe even better if you used "your neighbor Sally works for the government, she could read your chats too, do you really want that?"... but on a technical "forum", it (to me) gives off very politically biased vibes.

For what it's worth I don't support this Labour government one iota. I fully admit to being extremely biased against the Reform party, much in the same way that I'm biased against standing in front of a fully loaded 16 wheeler moving at 60mph.

Exactly this. What I'm talking about is just a specific instance of the generalised rule you've stated.

That shifting target can also shift immediately it doesnt need an election.

One is bad in principle and the other is also bad in practice. Both are very bad but the latter is more likely to move people to action.

Generally speaking it is worse if a party who is ideologically inclined to do something bad to you reads it, yes.

One side wants to purge large parts of the population and the other one doesn't. Yes, all parties can abuse data, but their policies do actually matter.

I think if you value privacy this isn't the right place to be making distinctions between parties. This only serves to alienate people and isn't the core argument.

I think it's more likely to get broad support when framed as us vs. them where "us" is normal working people regardless of political affiliation and "them" is our government elites trying to spy on us.

No, sorry, I've read too much history to buy into this line of reasoning. Authoritarians are a concrete threat to people's safety and they have a long history of abusing sensitive information about people to do so.

I think maybe we're talking past each other. I'm saying that when advocating for privacy, an effective framing (if winning privacy rights battles is the goal) is to make it "us" vs. "them" instead of some kind of party based push.

If it's associated too strongly with a specific party it alienates too many people to ever get mass support and become a fundamental value that "everyone" agrees on

I do see what you're trying to say. It's just that authoritarian supporters of privacy are a bit of an internal contradiction. Either they're fooled or are being disingenuous.

It's no good having people arguing for "privacy for me but not for thee", which is what it will boil down to. Ultimately authoritarians will use anything which gives them influence and control, with digital privacy violations being one of the easiest to rationalise (no violence, no physical theft).

So I don't see it as worthwhile trying to include such individuals in such a consensus. It's like trying to include foxes in a discussion about how we should best secure hen houses.

Yeah that makes sense, can't really disagree. i'm just always wary of othering large swaths of the population as beyond hope. I think so many powerful groups are invested in making us all hate eachother and in my experience we're all a lot more similar than we think

Yeah I do actually relate a lot to what you're saying. I should emphasise though that such individuals may still be worth reaching. I don't think most people stay lost causes indefinitely. But you have to break down the desire to support authoritarianism first before it makes sense to tackle digital privacy.

Unfortunately that just means there's a lot more sticky work untangling the kind of tribalistic politics we find ourselves in today.

100%. It's an uphill battle for sure

The other one isn't even voted in yet, hasn't done anything yet, and the current one already wants the data, that they shouldn't get.

The current ones are already abusing their power, and the other one might hypothetically do something, if and when and if at all.

This is like Alice making it legal and then punching you in the face and instead of you "punching back", you say "this is fine, but Bob is bad, because if he gets voted in, he'll punch harder".