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Richard Stallman On Facebook's Privacy Scandal: We Need a Law. There's No Reason We Should Let Them Exist if the Price is Knowing Everything About Us (nymag.com)
From a wide-ranging interview of Richard Stallman by New York Magazine: New York Magazine: Why do you think these companies feel justified in collecting that data?
Richard Stallman: Oh, well, I think you can trace it to the general plutocratic neoliberal ideology that has controlled the U.S. for more than two decades. A study established that since 1998 or so, the public opinion in general has no influence on political decisions. They're controlled by the desires of the rich and of special interests connected with whatever issue it is. So the companies that wanted to collect data about people could take advantage of this general misguided ideology to get away with whatever they might have wanted to do. Which happened to be collecting data about people. But I think they shouldn't be allowed to collect data about people.
We need a law. Fuck them -- there's no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They're not important -- our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we're heading toward. Most non-free software has malicious functionalities. And they include spying on people, restricting people -- that's called digital restrictions management, back doors, censorship.
Empirically, basically, if a program is not free software, it probably has one of these malicious functionalities. So imagine a driverless car, controlled of course by software, and it will probably be proprietary software, meaning not-free software, not controlled by the users but rather by the company that makes the car, or some other company. Well imagine if that has a back door, which enables somebody to send a command saying, "Ignore what the passenger said, and go there." Imagine what that would do. You can be quite sure that China will use that functionality to drive people toward the places they're going to be disappeared or punished. But can you be sure that the U.S. won't?
Richard Stallman: Oh, well, I think you can trace it to the general plutocratic neoliberal ideology that has controlled the U.S. for more than two decades. A study established that since 1998 or so, the public opinion in general has no influence on political decisions. They're controlled by the desires of the rich and of special interests connected with whatever issue it is. So the companies that wanted to collect data about people could take advantage of this general misguided ideology to get away with whatever they might have wanted to do. Which happened to be collecting data about people. But I think they shouldn't be allowed to collect data about people.
We need a law. Fuck them -- there's no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They're not important -- our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we're heading toward. Most non-free software has malicious functionalities. And they include spying on people, restricting people -- that's called digital restrictions management, back doors, censorship.
Empirically, basically, if a program is not free software, it probably has one of these malicious functionalities. So imagine a driverless car, controlled of course by software, and it will probably be proprietary software, meaning not-free software, not controlled by the users but rather by the company that makes the car, or some other company. Well imagine if that has a back door, which enables somebody to send a command saying, "Ignore what the passenger said, and go there." Imagine what that would do. You can be quite sure that China will use that functionality to drive people toward the places they're going to be disappeared or punished. But can you be sure that the U.S. won't?
So don't buy a house, get a mortgage, register to vote, start a business, have a phone number, or any of the other hundreds of things we do that get our information scraped?
People complain about FB because it's an easy target. Most would freak out if they knew what Lexis-Nexis and dozens of similar companies have on them, collected mainly from public records. Your life is already in the public domain.
There were very big differences in what the Obama campaign did with Facebook and what Cambridge Analytica did with Facebook. It all comes down to transparency and explicit consent.
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
I assume you will object to these facts because they are from a Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit who promotes checking facts. Let me know and I'll provide other sources, but you'll have probably have a problem with those too. Here is the transparency statement of that Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit so you can see who's paying for these facts, which you probably believe are liberal facts, which by your definition cannot be true.
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think it's insane to say something like Facebook should not exist because they can know everything about us.
The things that they know, ANYONE could know if they did what Facebook did.
What Mr. Stallman is saying is that we should enact laws against collecting all of this personal information. And if the result of those laws is that companies like Facebook go out of business because they can no longer be profitable without that capability, then they should be allowed to fail and no longer exist.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I believe I just did.
You're mistaken. It's impossible to know the amount of public support for gay marriage with absolute certainty, but we can state with a very high degree of certainty that it's above 50%.
No, they weren't. Nate Silver:
While most 2016 polls were off, they were within the margin of error. They were off by less than 4 points.
Current polling consistently shows support of gay marriage above 60%. Now, statistics is not an exact science -- the actual number could be a few points below that. 59%, 58%, 57%...sure. But under 50%? No. These are multiple reliable polling agencies. It's entirely possible that they're all off by 2-3 points, as the 2016 election showed us. But the odds that they're all off by more than ten points (and, in some cases, as many as 15) are so low as to be effectively impossible.
Further, current polls on public opinion of gay marriage are consistent with two things: increasing acceptance of gay marriage over time, and historical instances where public opinion on civil rights issues changed following court decisions.
Your picture is taken with a group of friends, one of whom posts the picture (and list of people in it) to Facebook (which includes GPS and timestamp). And since they already got your contact info from your friends phone book, they can correlate that data point to others they have on you from other sources.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Nobody forces you to use Facebook.
You need to catch up with some news :-
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Facebook is treating people as users even if they have never joined it. Actually it is not news, we knew this already, but sounds like it might be news to you.