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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 Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:32PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:32PM (#662996)

    While the current flap is about FB and personal data, if you read through the RMS article, he uses transit for an example. We are already paying to use the London Tube and there is no good reason that the electronic payment system has to know personal ID for all the users. RMS proposes rules that only allow personal data collection when it is necessary to the function of the system. For the Tube, anonymous cash payments to get the ticket should be available.

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  • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:14PM

    by Osamabobama (5842) on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:14PM (#663012)

    But, there might be terrorists! How will we find them if we don't keep track of every person? Because, statistically, only people become terrorists; we should track them all, just in case.

    (Except for you and me, of course; we're fine. But definitely other people...)

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