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.
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.