Almost one year ago I made this post about how the Wikipedia page for the “Nothing to hide” argument removed the text stating that it is a logical fallacy. I advocated for it to be added back. Three days after that post it was added back.
Exactly one year, to the day, after the logical fallacy text was removed, it got removed again. On October 19th of this year, a different user removed the text from the Wikipedia page, despite plenty of evidence that the “Nothing to hide” argument is a logical fallacy.
I am back here, once again, advocating that the text be added back.
P.S. It’s an absolutely crazy coincidence that the same edit happened to the same page on the same day exactly one year apart.
Okay, how about we rephrase “Nothing to hide” and change it to “Everything to show”. Doesn’t sound good, does it?
As an aside. this stupid, tired argument is old enough to be of drinking age. Let. It. Die.
I unfortunately still encounter it irl.
My immediate knee jerk reaction whenever someone has said this to me has always been “the law is so labyrinthine and convoluted that I may be breaking the law and not even know it.” I don’t trust the law to not fuck me.
“It is not that I have something to hide; it is just that I have nothing that I want you to know.”
“I require privacy not to conceal some malice in my own actions; but to protect against the malice of those seeking to abuse that authority.”
Why are you advocating here? Just add it back or post on the talk page.
“Your mom’s butthole has nothing to hide so guess what pics are going on facebook now, bitch”
The crux of the issue is that it’s not the citizens that determine what is hide-worthy.
Are you vocally unhappy with how corporations wreck the Earth and our future for monetary profit? Well then you might have something to hide. Are you not heterosexual and cisgendered? Well then you might have something to hide. Do you complain about taxes being too high while not seeing too many benefits and you’d prefer if they didn’t go to finance wars/invasions and subsidize harmful industries? Well then you might have something to hide.
The ruling class wants citizens with nothing to hide. Those don’t pose any risk to their power and privilege.
And adding a quote I have saved up:
“Whenever the subject of surveillance by police and government agencies is discussed online, invariably some John Doe will come along and declare that they are quite happy to give up some or all of their privacy in exchange for improved security, on the grounds that they have nothing to hide, and “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the authorities, or from whomever else might gain access to your “private” data (this can include private security companies, private investigators, banks, insurance companies, lawyers, employers, computer hackers, and any individual or company willing to pay for the information. And that’s in addition to the thousands of agents working at GCHQ, NSA etc.). Dissidents languishing in Chinese prisons and Russian gulags - not to mention millions of Jews and dissidents rounded up by the Nazis in the 1930s - might take a slightly different view”
They advertised maternity products to women that did not know that they were pregnant yet.
The ability for corporations to manipulate customers, and governments to manipulate citizens with the level of information they could gain, mean that democracy and freedom can only be protected if information on people is protected.
Oh, you have nothing to hide? Let me take a look at your butthole then
If anyone utters this argument i´ll hit them with “okay give me your phone and let me look through your browser history, pictures and messages.”
Or just: “if you have nothing to hide, why do you close and lock the bathroom door?”
It’s clearer about different kinds of privacy. Sometimes you just don’t want people looking at you doing things even if you’re not doing anything illegal.
Better yet say “Then give me your bank account info and social security number”
You won’t ask for bank statements or email passwords? I mean, they really have nothing to hide.
You have nothing to hide now, but when laws change, now there’s evidence you broke the law.
I think it just goes against the fundamental concepts of democracy.
The ruling class will have it in their interest to have people wanting and complying with their ideals and plans. Survaillance achieves a certain kind of control and spreads fear of “misconduct” and going against ideals of the government. This can be seen in the US currently, as well as many more authoratorian countries now, and also in the past, e.g. Russia, Nazi and East Germany (in it’s earlier years).
However democracy stands on that ability to voice and form your own opinion. The fundamental grounds of democracy is that people of various views express and evolve these, to have a healthy discussion and also critizise the government actions via the opposition.
This drastic taking of control and surpression is fundamentally not compatible with the democratic system.
While a single accepting of tracking cookies on a website might not seem like much. This slowly but surely leads to gigantic networks of your activities being created through the vast parts of our likes that we live online these days. And national actors such as the CIA, NSA, etc. are known so buy such data from data brokers to spy on people.
Ignorance of such problems is the worst thing that can happen. We have already been proven that so many times. We’ve seen how fast an authoratorian regime can rise to power, and we cannot stay silent until it affects us, because then it is probably too late. I think Martin Niemöllers “First They Came” is very fitting here.
So never ignore such movements, however insignificant they seem.
I don’t see how it is a logical fallacy. A fallacy is when the conclusion is not supported by the premises. “Nothing to hide” is only one of those two required elements, the premise. The conclusion is undefined and might or might not be supported by the premise.
“Nothing to hide” is often a fallacy when arguing, say, government surveillance. “If you have nothing to hide you’ll accept metal detectors at the airport” is a fallacy. I accept metal detectors, but it’s because I value everyone’s safety over my minor invasion of privacy, I don’t think the premise of “nothing to hide” leads to the conclusion.
But I can’t say for sure every “nothing to hide” argument would be a fallacy without the rest of the argument.
“I have nothing to hide therefore you have no reason to look”
All this babbling about complex constructs, it’s really quite simple.
When we have no moments to outselves, when everything we know, we think, we do, is being recorded and processed (which it luckily isn’t yet), then regurgitated in one way or the other, we lose identity.
Identity is a core part of being human. There are reasons that other people shouldn’t know what we think, I think you can figure those out for yourselves.So when someone says “They have nothing to hide”, then they ignore a fundamental part of themselves, which they need to live. It’s like saying someone doesn’t need eyebrows, because they have no emotions to show. It is just false.
Everybody has something they do not want others to know. Whether it is you thinking badly about your elders, which you do out of love and to protect them, or thinking how your colleague is doing something wrong, which will train you to be better than them in that instance.
Once these things are no longer private, identities break down and society does not work anymore. Socialism, capitalism, communism, all those depend on faces.
This is even true for the animal kindom. Or do you think a lion could catch prey, if the prey knows the lion’s though, or the prey could escape the lion if the lion knew the prey’s thoughts?
There are places where privacy can instrumentalized, but that’s where we can do something against it. The problem is about finding the fine line where we maximize privacy for a healthy society, while minimizing potential issues through it. We’re way past that line.
it seems to me that people are arguing over semantics why it shouldn’t be listed as a “logical fallacy”. kinda reminds me of people arguing about semantics on why i shouldn’t call people nazis when they’re not actually members of the NSDAP. fucking infuriating.
It’s more like calling “nazi” to all forms of authoritarian regimes, even the authoritarian left positions in the opposite side of the spectrum.
There’s a distinction between “informal fallacy” and “logical (or formal) fallacy”. Both have separate articles in wikipedia as well. Why not just call it “fallacy” without categorizing it into a specific subcategory it does not fit anyway?
This seems a good answer, let’s go with this!
Why does it need to be considered “formal” by some arbitrary standard to be both a fallacy and related to logic.
The “formal” part comes from “formal system”, which is essentially the use of rules of inference based on an initial set of presuppositions, with an exact/mathematical approach to “truth”.
The idea of “informal logic” is something some people have wanted to put forward, but it’s a much younger and not as well defined term, and whether it should really be considered “logic” is something that has criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_logic#Criticisms
Perhaps in the end all logic is formal logic, the problem is that we know from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems that not everything is computable and translatable into a formal system… to solve this you’d have to model the statements into a Gödel/Lobian machine (at which point you are essentially building an AI).
I’ve commented it in the other post, but in my opinion, the issue of the “nothing to hide” -> “no worry in showing” statement is that in between lines (specially in the context for which it’s used) it seems to want to imply that having something to hide must be something rare or perhaps wrong… as if it were not possible to want to hide things that are good for society to keep hidden.
This isn’t a formal, logical fallacy, but an informal one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy
From a perspective free of presuppositions and biases, I don’t think the logic of the argument on itself is wrong, because of course I wouldn’t be worried about my privacy if I had no interest in keeping my private information hidden… but the premise isn’t true here! the context in which the argument is used is the problem… not the logic of it.
It’s not incorrect to say: “nothing to hide” -> “no worry in showing” …what’s incorrect is assuming that the “nothing to hide” antecedent is true for all law abiding citizens …as if people didn’t have an interest in keeping perfectly legal and legitimate things hidden and safe from as many prying eyes as possible. The fallacy is in the way that it’s used, they are pretending that this means people shouldn’t be worried, when in fact it means the opposite, since everyone does, in fact, have information that should remain hidden. For our own safety and the safety of our society! …so everyone should in fact be worried about breaches in privacy.
