Question: what links the citizens of Kansas City with Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the distinguished statesman who is now free to spend more time with his consulting business? Answer: both are confused about privacy, and the importance thereof. Over in Kansas City, customers of AT&T were offered an interesting deal by the company. For $70 a month, they could have really fast (Gigabit) broadband connections, brought to their homes via fibre-optic cables. But for an extra $29 a month, AT&T undertook not to track or otherwise snoop on their internet usage.

Setting out the deal, AT&T told its customers that it tracks “the webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter… AT&T Internet Preferences works independently of your browser’s privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track, and private browsing. If you opt in to AT&T Internet Preferences, AT&T will still be able to collect and use your web browsing information independent of those settings.” Users who do not opt in will be charged another $29 a month.

Just as an aside, note the fact that it doesn’t matter a jot what the poor saps do with the browsers’ privacy settings etc. But the real nub of the matter is this: since AT&T began offering this choice more than a year ago, the “vast majority” of its subscribers have elected to opt in to the “ad-supported” (ie surveillance) model. There are only two possible inferences to be drawn from this: either AT&T subscribers don’t think their privacy is worth $29 a month; or they don’t believe that AT&T won’t continue to snoop on them even if they do pay the surcharge.

Either way, the experiment suggests that internet users don’t seem to value their privacy very highly. Which is misleading, because in fact they do value it very highly indeed. The trouble is that they don’t realise this until it’s been violated. One sees this all the time in the traumatic shock that afflicts internet users when they discover that something that they thought was private is suddenly exposed to the glare of online publicity. Then they really get it. As Joni Mitchell puts it, “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got/Till it’s gone”.

Which brings us to Sir Malcolm and his comrade in embarrassment, Jack Straw. The former tried to brazen it out in robust lawyerly fashion – until his party threw him overboard. The latter was at least candid in saying that he was “mortified” at having his private conversations exposed to public gaze. But what’s most interesting to me about both men is that they used to be stout advocates of the standard mantra of the security authorities – “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” from bulk surveillance.

Both claim that they had done nothing wrong, at least in the sense of nothing that was unlawful, and I am prepared to accept that. But at the same time it’s clear that they have been grievously embarrassed by Channel 4’s toe-curling publicising of activities that they thought were private. In that sense, they are in the same boat as most citizens. We all do harmless or foolish things that we nevertheless regard as private matters that are none of the government’s (or anybody else’s) business. That’s what privacy is all about.

The really sinister thing about the nothing-to-hide argument is its underlying assumption that privacy is really about hiding bad things. As the computer-security guru Bruce Schneier once observed, the nothing-to-hide mantra stems from “a faulty premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong”. But surveillance can have a chilling effect by inhibiting perfectly lawful activities (lawful in democracies anyway) such as free speech, anonymous reading and having confidential conversations.

So the long-term message for citizens of democracies is: if you don’t want to be a potential object of attention by the authorities, then make sure you don’t do anything that might make them – or their algorithms – want to take a second look at you. Like encrypting your email, for example; or using Tor for anonymous browsing. Which essentially means that only people who don’t want to question or oppose those in power are the ones who should be entirely relaxed about surveillance.

We need to reboot the discourse about democracy and surveillance. And we should start by jettisoning the cant about nothing-to-hide. The truth is that we all have things to hide – perfectly legitimately. Just as our disgraced former foreign secretaries had.