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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: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:03AM (6 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:03AM (#662794)

    Compare the revenue streams per user. Big tech wants to waste Sagans on huge server farms to make up for the inefficiency of the code produced by their overpaid, incompetent but oh so "diverse" freak show workforce in some of the most expensive zip codes outside of Capital City itself. Then all the management types must be billionaires. Ads, data farming and bilking pension funds and such pay that kind of money, subscriptions? Not so much.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM (#662796) Journal

    Compare the revenue streams per user. Big tech wants to waste Sagans...

    I thought we where discussing business models (and perhaps their novelty), not the wants of big tech.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:47PM (3 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:47PM (#662911)

    It's the free market, jmorris. "Big tech" is not going to become competent and efficient until and unless the market requires it.

    Right now, the market is basically a gamble. 1% of software products or some other stupidly small number reach millions of users. The rest don't. Nobody really understands why enough to replicate it consistently. So every venture is a crap shoot.

    As long as that's how the market works, there is no pressure for anybody to be more "competent". We don't even know how to define competence in terms of market viability right now.

    Not that this stops you from defining competence as "not involving the people I don't like".

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:24PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:24PM (#662994)

      Enough said.

      • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 06 2018, @08:57PM

        by meustrus (4961) on Friday April 06 2018, @08:57PM (#663546)

        Actually, tech is perhaps the most under-regulated industry in America right now. Mostly because we have only come to understand tech enough to regulate it in the post-Reagan deregulation era. There is a notable exception however for the telecoms, who still contend with (and benefit from) regulation aimed at telephone and broadcast TV communication.

        But in virtually any other industry - agriculture, medicine, finance, manufacturing, entertainment, retail, and logistics all come immediately to mind - you would be absolutely correct.

        --
        If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:41PM (#662998)

      That post describes exactly what happened to musicians and music since the Internet got going.

      ie. a couple of dozen "stars" now command and dominate what would have been spread out over tens of thousands of artists only 25 years ago, everyone is at a loss for how to manage the situation; fast-forward to now and it is pretty much a "rich man's sport" instead of a discipline you get paid for. I haven't seen a promising young musician in the studio for years, as the computer revolution means not having to be competent at much more than asking the engineer to cut-n-paste.

      - AC (who really should sign up...)

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:53PM (#662947)

    Blah, blah, blah. Sounds like sour grapes to me.