Certain interactions with the government (assuming you are behaving peacefully) seem like a special case of dealing with an adversarial or exploitative agent. When an agent has social power over you, they might easily be able to harm or inconvenience you if you answer some questions truthfully, whereas it would be hard for you to harm them if you lied. Telling the truth in that case hurts you, but lying harms nobody (aside from foiling the exploitative plans of the other agent, which doesn’t really count).
A more mundane example would be if a website form asks you for more personal information than it needs, and requires this information. For instance, let’s say the website asks for your phone number or address when there is suspiciously no reason why they should need to call you or ship you anything. If you fill in a false phone number to be able to submit the form, then you are technically lying to them, but I think it’s justified. Same thing for websites that require you to fill in a name, but where they don’t actually need it (e.g. unlike financial transactions, or social networks that deal with real identities).
The website probably isn’t trying to violate your rights, but it’s trying to profit from your private information, either for marketing to you (which you consider pointless), or selling the information (which is exploitative, and could result in other people intruding into your privacy). Gaining your info will predictably create zero sum or negative sum outcomes. Lying is an appropriate response to exploitation attempts like these.And if they aren’t trying to exploit your private information, or use it to give you a service, then they don’t really need it, so lying doesn’t hurt them at all, and you might as well do it to be safe from spam.
Telling the truth is a good default because human relationships are cooperative or neutral by default. But the ethics of lying are much more complex in adversarial or exploitative situations.
Certain interactions with the government (assuming you are behaving peacefully) seem like a special case of dealing with an adversarial or exploitative agent. When an agent has social power over you, they might easily be able to harm or inconvenience you if you answer some questions truthfully, whereas it would be hard for you to harm them if you lied. Telling the truth in that case hurts you, but lying harms nobody (aside from foiling the exploitative plans of the other agent, which doesn’t really count).
A more mundane example would be if a website form asks you for more personal information than it needs, and requires this information. For instance, let’s say the website asks for your phone number or address when there is suspiciously no reason why they should need to call you or ship you anything. If you fill in a false phone number to be able to submit the form, then you are technically lying to them, but I think it’s justified. Same thing for websites that require you to fill in a name, but where they don’t actually need it (e.g. unlike financial transactions, or social networks that deal with real identities).
The website probably isn’t trying to violate your rights, but it’s trying to profit from your private information, either for marketing to you (which you consider pointless), or selling the information (which is exploitative, and could result in other people intruding into your privacy). Gaining your info will predictably create zero sum or negative sum outcomes. Lying is an appropriate response to exploitation attempts like these.And if they aren’t trying to exploit your private information, or use it to give you a service, then they don’t really need it, so lying doesn’t hurt them at all, and you might as well do it to be safe from spam.
Telling the truth is a good default because human relationships are cooperative or neutral by default. But the ethics of lying are much more complex in adversarial or exploitative situations.