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posted by chromas on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the remember-the-printers dept.

Richard Stallman writes in the Guardian:

Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.

Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook. Deeper, meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures.

The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy's sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU's approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.

The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:02AM (4 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:02AM (#662782) Homepage Journal

    Put this in your hosts file:

    127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
    127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

    If you don't know what a hosts file is, ask someone who's really into computers.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:32AM (1 child)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:32AM (#662803) Journal

    /etc/hosts file is too inefficient and does not scale to the size needed in these cases. You have a Macintosh, presumably with OS X and not GNU/Linux. If it is OS X, then you have PF and can set up a table to block packets to and from Faecebook's networks. Look it up in the WHOIS database and then cycle through the network ranges, adding them with pfctl(8). You can save the networks to a file and have pf.conf(5) load them every boot.

    Or do likewise with iptables if you are running GNU/Linux instead.

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    • (Score: 2) by ragequit on Friday April 06 2018, @04:28AM

      by ragequit (44) on Friday April 06 2018, @04:28AM (#663260) Journal

      ...or get Little Snitch from ObDev. Costs money, but works really well and is far easier to configure.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:58PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:58PM (#662948) Journal

    Don't forget to block the rest of them too!

    This may help:
    https://api.hackertarget.com/hostsearch/?q=google.com [hackertarget.com]

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:45PM (#663182)

    That only works for those 2 specific sites. Hosts is a 1 to 1 lookup. It is not a fuzzy search. *.google-analytics.com does not work either for anyone asking.

    You want something more along the lines of a blacklist DNS server. I personally use no-script and ublock. Those have the filters to get 99.99% of it.

    Also I found fb to be much more crazy about it. They have a few dozen domains they use. Also google owns a LOT of domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google [wikipedia.org] make sure you get the doubleclick ones.

    But if you are dead set on using hosts file http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm [mvps.org] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts [github.com]