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RMS on a Radical Proposal to Keep Your Personal Data Safe

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM (#662797)

    Really? Soviet Union? Soviet Union had very little surveillance in comparison to what Facebook is doing, or what lots of police-backed governments are doing in places like London and others. The comparison between the two is like comparing logistics systems today to that of the Roman Empire.

    I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data. ... 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.

    But the basic function of Facebook is to collect such data to facilitate ads! Any website that has AdWords is collecting such data by-proxy.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:19AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:19AM (#662799)

    Really? Soviet Union? Soviet Union had very little surveillance in comparison to what Facebook is doing, or what lots of police-backed governments are doing in places like London and others.

    That's what he said.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:35AM (#662805)

      No, they said: "You don't know how lucky you are, boy, BACK in the USSR!" British Blokes, IIRC.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @07:15AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 05 2018, @07:15AM (#662809) Journal

    But the basic function of Facebook is to collect such data to facilitate ads! Any website that has AdWords is collecting such data by-proxy.

    For now.
    It may come a time when the consequence of triggering a "positive detection event" will cause a "person disappearance event" like it did in the old USSR-and-friends.

    Or... maybe it already started?!? Not that those kind of events were publicly advertised by the tovarisch in the secret police back then

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:49PM (#662914)
    The real surveillance state of the Iron Curtain was East Germany. The Stasi basically had half their population spying on the other half and they even had sealed jars with people's scents in them for dogs to sniff. They made the Soviets look like amateurs. Facebook though beats them all when it comes to scale.