The most common argument used in defense of mass surveillance is ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’. Try saying that to women in the US states where abortion has suddenly become illegal. Say it to investigative journalists in authoritarian countries. Saying ‘I have nothing to hide’ means you stop caring about anyone fighting for their freedom. And one day, you might be one of them.

  • shneancy@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I don’t know where I read it but the best defence to “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is “I don’t have anything to hide but I don’t trust your judgment or intentions”

            • STUPIDVIPGUY@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Can you just take a second to reflect on how inelegantly you have taken being wrong? You made an incorrect assertion of a fact, just accept you made a mistake and move on. Being stubborn and defensive makes you look kind of immature.

              Hope you can take this advice

                • STUPIDVIPGUY@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  Yes you admitted your mistake. And yes you still acted a bit foolish. That’s not a false accusation, it’s just an accusation.

                  (THIS is an example of an opinion)

        • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Lol the fact that you think someone presenting a different opinion means they represent anyone is silly, stop perpetuating the politics = sports teams mentality

        • subignition@fedia.io
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          4 months ago

          Abortion should be illegal because it violates the UDHR.

          This is an (unsubstantiated) allegation of fact, not an opinion.

          • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            I agree because someone told me that the law was edited but the person who replied clearly said “opinion”, not “information”. I do believe that was a sign of toxicity and not just laziness or English issue. As a proof, my own psychological researches confirm that people from similar communities tend to exhibit increased irritability, toxicity and desire of creating exclusive communities.

    • bloubz@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 months ago

      I don’t think that’s relevant but still curious to know where you think in the Universal Declaration of human rights or in the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme de du citoyen it forbids abortion

        • bloubz@lemmygrad.ml
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          4 months ago

          What are you even saying? You were talking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is NOT a US text. And it is based on the Declaration from France from 1789.

          Anyway, the UDHR says that humans are born equal in rights, and that individuals have the right to live. It’s a good question to wonder what is considered an individual indeed. For example, the US law defines an individual as a human being who was born alive

          • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            It is not a US text but it is accepted to work in the US afaik and I’m quite sure of it. Another person told me that the declaration was edited in 2018 to include the right of abortion. I didn’t know about that and I, in contrary to most people in this discussion, am not afraid to admit it and therefore that I was wrong.

    • Substance_P@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’m all for privacy, but I’m not all for using the comment section to talk about abortion rights. Sure there is some overlap, but the comment section here seems to show the ease of which the human psyche can get distracted, these tangential bickerings are the reason big data is so effortlessly steam rolling us.

      • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Ah, right. I forgot that they’re based in Sweden. That’s understandable if it’s simply a lack of familiarity with the language, but, still, I would expect a company like Mullvad to at least have one native-equivalent English speaker to look over their public facing English stuff. None of this is the end of the world, ofc — I’m just mildly surprised.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    This is why you don’t rig a fair system… Because your ‘rig’ may one day be used against you.

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Problem is that people are essentially brainwashed to cheer in favor of oppressive policy. It should be a crime to make misleading claims or statements, but, such is the world of advertising and marketing.

  • Einar@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    This applies to so many things. Someone’s lifestyle might come under attack, someone’s religion might be persecuted, someone has sensitive information to share, and so on and so forth.

  • Hellmo_luciferrari@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you don’t have anything to say.

    • sqgl@beehaw.org
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      4 months ago

      It was Edward Snowden who said that “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    There is so many good responses to this. Here is one I just came up with:

    Legal and not embarrassing are not the same thing.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 months ago

    We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

    But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

    And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

    Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

    Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

    Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

    (But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

    What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

    So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years).

      Did that stop being the case?

      conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

      Yeah, they’ve also tried to ram through ACTA, CISPA and the TPP since then.

    • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I wouldn’t disagree about lying police, authoritarian judges filling for-profit prisons, etc but what felonies do I commit every day?