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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: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:56AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:56AM (#662845) Journal
    RMS talks about the GDPR. His complaint is that it relates to processing of information, not collection. He would like to prevent companies from collecting information in the first place. For once, I agree with him. The easiest way to prevent power from being abused is to prevent power from being concentrated.
    --
    sudo mod me up
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @07:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @07:39PM (#663073)

    His complaint is that it relates to processing of information, not collection

    But he is wrong on that part. The GDPR also limits data retention [privacy-regulation.eu]:

    1. Personal data shall be:

    (b) collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes

    (c) adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed ('data minimisation');

    (e) kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed