It's not a fallacy. When a printer driver reporting stats back to the manufacturer made national news in the early 2000s and prompted calls for laws regulating privacy, the argument was that it was a slippery slope fallacy to assert that privacy violations would get worse. Look at where we are now.
By itself no, but it is often used fallaciously. Such as in this case, when someone is opposing some good thing on the basis that that good thing might, some day, lead to bad things.
Not realizing that many things actually ARE a slippery slope is what has gotten the world into a lot of messes. Nearly every legitimate privacy concern that we have today started out with a legitimate and we'll meaning purpose.
Our entire legal system is predicated on common law precedent. So it is very valid in many cases to argue that allowing something good now, might set us up for something very bad later.
What you’ve described there is exactly how bad things come to be.
You think people elect for bad things? Bad governments, bad software or privacy violations? They chose things that are full of rhetoric and promises of good things then those bad things get snuck in off the back off relaxed regulation, or existing software adoption, etc.
Take Facebook as an example, people didn’t sign up to it thinking “I wanted to be tracked around the internet so I can have personalised adverts” nor dis Zuckerburg think “Wouldn’t it be good to create a platform that could latter be used for rigging elections”. No, instead we got there because of a serious of good ideas that slowly got abused.
There is a saying that goes “The path to hell is paved by good intentions.” I’m not a religious man but I think that beautifully illustrates how slippery slopes are not a logical fallacy.
No, good things such as telemetry and automated error reporting so that bugs can be fixed effectively and efficiently and everyone is better off for it.
That's true. However, we also don't collect history for the fun of it.
Over the course of the last 20 years, we've seen that once a data collection and digital surveillance framework is put in place, the surveillance tends to expand.
Slippery slope arguments, sans good reasoning, tend to be fallacies. However, don't fall into the trap of thinking that an argument backed by historical record is a slippery slope just because it's predicting an outcome. We might call that the "history is all slippery slopes" fallacy. Stating "this has happened before multiple times before, and each time has lead to x" is a very different argument to stating "this has happened, so the logical extrapolation is x".
Exactly, which is why I'd be more interested in concrete commonalities of slippery slopes that were actually realized, and not just a general "history has plenty of slippery slopes".
The fallacy is to assume, without evidence, that the slope is slippery. There are plenty of slopes that aren't. Probably most, just you don't think about those because you know they aren't slippery already.
For example, I slept in 'til 8:30 today. OMG, a slippery slope. Next thing you know, I'll be sleeping until 3PM. Til midnight! I will never wake up again. But as it happens, sleeping in isn't a slippery slope. I don't think there's any solid evidence that telemetry is either.
