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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?
The facebook fiasco is bad, but there simply needs to be the same rules for corporations that exist for government. The data that corporations collect now make laws against search and seizure and privacy regulations laughable. They can't get your data directly but simply allow Google and Facebook to know everything about you then get it that way. I went to a hospital this past weekend that wanted to scan my drivers license just to go see my dad in the hospital. I refused and said I prefer to move about anonymously and refused to give it up. Where are we going to be when EVERY place demands identification? The government can't directly track your movements gestapo "paper's please" style, but they'll effectively have the exact same trail. It's not acceptable for your identification to be needed to participate in society.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
The Amerikuk Right needed someone to blame for their loss in Vietnam, y'know rather than admit they were wrong in waging a war of oppression against the Vietnamese people (there was also no secret bombings of, say, Cleveland.. the immorality was ALL America's to own) so they blamed "Liberals" for young black men not wanting to blindly go die in Nam for Whitey Nixon (if thoe damn LIBERALS had just known their place we'ld have WON THE NAM!).
It all falls out from there.. refusal to admit ones wrongdoings leads to greater trauma and devastation of the self. SAD.
I am not a member,user of FB then why the hell should they data mine me others because our relatives put a picture up that happen to have me in them? I never agreed to FB terms and they don't have a right to spy on me at all. IMO what they are doing is wiretapping on mega scales..Someone should be in jail for wiretapping non users......
Jack of all trades,master of none
Not according to Plato. The people who wrote the US constitution were the leading philosophers and scientists of their time and were very afraid of democracies, and wrote as such, which is why the us US a republic.
He isn't mad. Far from it.
Mad, unlikely, an asshole, most likely. We tried to invite him at a conference we were organizing in 2004, and submitted a two pages list of requirements, from hotel connectivity to tea brands. And I'm not even getting started about the way he behaves in the FSF, he made a lot of damages in their projects...
There was a quote, I forget where it comes from:
"Yes he's an arsehole. But he's *our* arsehole. And you can't hate your own arsehole."
So what you're saying is that in the 1960s when we kids all watched cartoons on Saturday morning, we were being 'sold' since the shows were free and sponsored by commercials?
No, Not true.
I don't know about the 1960s, but a few decades later we can say "Yes, true, and the people running the TV channels are very aware of it". The CEO of TF1, the biggest French TV channel, has actually said it himself unambiguously in 2004: "Ce que nous vendons à Coca-Cola, c'est du temps de cerveau humain disponible" which can be translated as "What we sell to Coca-Cola is human brain availability time". He was explaining that the human brain must be receptive to ads, therefore TV programs should ease this receptiveness by being entertaining and relaxing, to prepare the brain between two messages. In the same paragraph he said that the base job of TF1 is to help Coca-Cola sell their product. He then proceeded to explain that they must contantly seek the TV programs that will help them achieve that goal.
It's all described here but only in French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not only are your values perverted (another poster rightly points out that you can't take it with you) what's left behind is a bad way to treat people—proprietary software is rightly identified as user-subjugating by rms. Technical achievement and business deals come and go, but treating people ethically sticks with people for a long time and sets a great example for how we can run a society that we can live with.
In fact, Steve Jobs (while heading up NeXT) was the first commercial copyright infringer of GCC, then known as the GNU C Compiler later the GNU Compiler Collection when it compiled a lot more languages than just C. NeXT needed a compiler, GCC did the job, and NeXT wrote Objective-C support for GCC then chose to distribute only object code for NeXT's GCC variant. This was a clear violation of the GNU GPL v2 (the relevant GCC license at the time) as there was no complete corresponding source code on offer or copy distributed alongside the binaries. Someone from the FSF (I'm not sure who, Eben Moglen perhaps?) had a talk with NeXT and after some discussions (which I'm guessing were quite unpleasant for Jobs and NeXT's lawyers to hear) NeXT ended up doing what they should have done from the start: shipping complete corresponding source code to their variant of GCC with the GCC binaries. The copy I saw was in a box of Extended Density (2.88MB) floppy disks.
Brad Kuhn, former FSF Executive Director current President and Distinguished Technologist at the Software Freedom Conservancy, has told this story before and he (probably rightly) speculates this is what drove Apple to become the irrational GPL-hater they are today: NeXT got caught treating their users badly, violating GCC's license, and subverting a license designed to let them do what they needed while also treating the users justly. This is why Apple is moving toward a non-copylefted compiler (which Kuhn speculates they'll someday stop contributing to when it becomes good enough for them to use without caring about contributing back). This is why Apple switched away from the (I'm told better functioning) Samba to some proprietary SMB implementation for MacOS X. I'm told some other GPL-covered software on MacOS X remains out of date; if that's so, this is probably why. And it's telling that Apple is no rush to replace CUPS as they did Samba and GCC—Apple bought Easy Software (which wrote CUPS) thus making Apple CUPS' copyright holder so Apple went from being a GPL licensee to being a GPL licensor. This also helps illustrate why Apple's view of the GPL is irrational: GPL-covered programs were perfectly good for them throughout NeXT and Apple's early days with MacOS X, and the GPL is apparently remains a fine license when licensing to others. But share and share alike is apparently not the way they want to treat their users for plenty of other software they distribute.
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