In my post on why mass surveillance is not normal, I referenced how the Wikipedia page for the Nothing to hide argument labels the argument as a “logical fallacy.” On October 19th, user Gratecznik edited the Wikipedia page to remove the “logical fallacy” text. I am here to prove that the “Nothing to hide” argument is indeed a logical fallacy and go through some arguments against it.
The “Nothing to hide” argument is an intuitive but misleading argument, stating that if a person has done nothing unethical, unlawful, immoral, etc., then there is no reason to hide any of their actions or information. However, this argument has been well covered already and debunked many times (here is one example).
Besides the cost of what it takes for someone to never hide anything, there are many reasons why a person may not want to share information about themselves, even if no misconduct has taken place. The “Nothing to hide” argument intuitively (but not explicitly) assumes that those whom you share your information with will handle it with care and not falsely use it against you. Unfortunately, that is not how it currently works in the real world.
You don’t get to make the rules on what is and is not deemed unlawful. Something you do may be ethical or moral, but unlawful and could cost you if you aren’t able to hide those actions. For example, whistleblowers try to expose government misconduct. That is an ethical and moral goal, but it does not align with government interests. Therefor, if the whistleblower is not able to hide their actions, they will have reason to fear the government or other parties. The whistleblower has something to hide, even though it is not unethical or immoral.
You are likely not a whistleblower, so you have nothing to hide, right? As stated before, you don’t get to make the rules on what is and is not deemed unlawful. Anything you say or do could be used against you. Having a certain religion or viewpoint may be legal now, but if one day those become outlawed, you will have wished you hid it.
Just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean it is justified to share everything. Privacy is a basic human right (at least until someone edits Wikipedia to say otherwise), so you shouldn’t be forced to trust whoever just because you have nothing to hide.
For completeness, here is a proof that the “Nothing to hide” argument is a logical fallacy by using propositional calculus:
Let p be the proposition “I have nothing to hide”
Let q be the proposition “I should not be concerned about surveillance”
You can represent the “Nothing to hide” argument as follows:
p → q
I will be providing a proof by counterexample. Suppose p is true, but q is false (i.e. “I have nothing to hide” and “I am concerned about surveillance”):
p ∧ ¬q
Someone may have nothing to hide, but still be concerned about the state of surveillance. Since that is a viable scenario, we can conclude that the “Nothing to hide” argument is invalid (a logical fallacy).
I know someone is going to try to rip that proof apart. If anyone is an editor on Wikipedia, please revert the edit that removed the “logical fallacy” text, as it provides a very easy and direct way for people to cite that the “Nothing to hide” argument is false.
Thanks for reading!
- The 8232 Project
Some may have nothing to hide, but still be concerned about the state of surveillance
This is where your proof falls apart. It follows from nothing you’ve established and relies on context outside of our proof, which does not work with propositional logic. Another commenter goes into a bit more detail with some pre-defined axioms; with the right axioms you can wave away anything. However you have to agree on your axioms to begin with (this is the foundation of things like non-Euclidean geometry; choose to accept normally unacceptable axioms).
A rigorous proof using propositional calculus would have to start with the definitions of what things are, what hiding means, what surveillance is, how it relates to hiding, and slowly work your way to showing, based on the definitions and lemmas you’ve built along the way, how this actually works. Understanding how to build arithmetic from the Peano Axioms is a good foundation.
However, by attempting to represent this conversation in formal logic, we fall prey to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which means something beyond the axioms in our system has to be based on faith. This arguably leads us back to the beginning, where “nothing to hide” and “state surveillance” fall under personal preference.
Please note that I think “nothing to hide” is bullshit always and do not support heavy surveillance. I like the discussion you’ve started.
This is some BS. What the OP haplessly tries to say is simply modus ponens. What Gödel are you talking about.
I’m not sure how you prove by negation in this case just via modus ponens. Care to enlighten me? I opened with something that doesn’t follow so that would be a great place to start.
Give me a consistent formal system with a list of theorems to prove OP’s conjecture and I’ll show you how we have gaps in the system. My analytic philosophy is pretty rusty; I think there are a few 20th century folks you can start from for this.
In modus ponens you have four cases:
| A | B | A -> B | |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | 0 | 0 | TRUE |
| b | 0 | 1 | TRUE |
| c | 1 | 0 | FALSE |
| d | 1 | 1 | TRUE |
Here, A is “Having sth to hide”, and B “Caring about encryption”. Obviously case b says that although people having something to hide seek out encrypted methods of communication, it is logically accepted that there might be other reasons, even unknown. A more silly example is this: the grass is wet does not necessarily means it has rained. There might be other reasons. But this does not mean that rain does not make the grass wet.
To sum up, the OP could have just said that. It does not change anything anyway. You can’t beat a propaganda apparatus with this “fallacy talk”.
Sure you can always infinitely define what is behind but I don’t think it is relevant here or you couldn’t do any moral logic.
The two axioms I assumed are A1 a proven fact and A2 the very defintion of having something to hide. It is enough for this specific problem.
I don’t see how Gödel’s theorems are useful since they say that a given system of actions is either incomplete or inconsistent. With these two axioms it’s hardly inconsistent and we don’t care about it being incomplete since we only have one theorem to prove
