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.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:49AM (18 children)
Good ideas, non-starter unless we are willing to pay. First Law of the Internet, if you aren't paying for the service it is because you are the product. If Facebook and the others can't monitize the users and ads are becoming outright hostile and unprofitable, we would have to be willing to pay for the services we use. Nobody seems to be willing to do that.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:03AM
For me it would be sufficient if I could use bitcoin and a one-time-use email address.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:09AM
New business model? Not at all. We already cripple technology to protect special interests... This is just another example. And it is absurd. Besides, what could be better than drowning the opposition in endless paperwork? Let's not just record all the data. Let's bury 'em in it. Clog the pipes!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:20AM (7 children)
You mean... like the Soylentnews business model?
I have a hunch that's not quite new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:03AM (6 children)
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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM
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)
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)
Enough said.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 06 2018, @08:57PM
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
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
Blah, blah, blah. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:32AM
Maybe that is because it is not actually a service, much like jmorris posts. What corporations are doing is shorting their customer base, speculating on future purchases and future profits, which they then bundle as sell as derivatives. Of course, at some point, someone, not jumorris, will realize that the entire business model is based on lies, and the whole thing will come tumbling down. It will make Pets.com look like child's play. The Republican deregulation crash of 2008 will seem like paradise. The Great Depression itself will seem insignificant, because this time we gots our Hitler (Trump) before the crash, so as to avoid the rush.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:37AM
Outside of free sites, I accept this model. I want the web site owners to exchange their pearls of wisdom for hard cold cash (well, in this case more like electrons.) The free sites are very numerous. Every manufacturer has a free web site. Every sufficiently large group has a web site. They carry 10^10 more information than the infotainment sites.
The flaw of the current system is in fact that most visitors are not aware what information they reveal to the server. Each web site takes a small drop of blood from you, but when done browsing you feel tired. On the other hand, everyone recognizes the value of money, and most people are wise enough to not pay for nothing. A subscription to a site means that the site is interesting, useful - not a a clickbait collection that is filled with "10 easy ways to do %x%" that are scraped from other sites. With the current system junk sites flourish because each clickbait loads 30 ads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:47PM
Wrong. Plenty of people would pay and it would be pretty damn cheap. No one wants to pay these days because there simply are so many "free" services.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:32PM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:14PM
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...)
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:31PM
The idea that you pay and are not tracked will not happen.
Remember cable TV was sold to us originally because it had no advertisements. Yet many still pay for it. You are literally paying to be advertised to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @01:35AM
"Good ideas, non-starter unless we are willing to pay. First Law of the Internet, if you aren't paying for the service it is because you are the product. [...]"
Good ideas, non-starter unless we are willing to pay. First Law of the Internet, if you aren't paying for the service it is because you are the target.
There, FTFY,
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:15PM
RMS has always been big on a gift-based software economy, either in the form of donations to developers, or the act of developing for free in the first place, or the act of providing the server to host it from in the first place.
The strangest thing about this model though is just how much of it works, and works well. The Linux and BSD ecosystems, IRC networks, Mastodon, Wikipedia, etc, are all proof that this CAN result in some very usable products that people benefit from.
RMS's "business" model tends to be "who said anything about business? I was talking about technology."
This isn't something many professionals in the technology sector really want to hear, however. And while selling support can work for some things (see Redhat), there's not really an analogous way to apply that to something like Wikipedia, or a social media network. Self hosted federating software is PROBABLY the way to do away with much of the surveillance without incurring massive costs and maintaining most of the functionality, but frankly, for now, the software just isn't there. Mastodon federates, but the amount that may be available to your instance's sysadmin (and potentially others in the Fediverse due to a lack of encryption at every turn) might be more than many are comfortable with...and while it might be seen to compete well with the functionality of Twitter, it's certainly not a Facebook killer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:02AM (4 children)
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.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:32AM (1 child)
/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.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by ragequit on Friday April 06 2018, @04:28AM
...or get Little Snitch from ObDev. Costs money, but works really well and is far easier to configure.
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:58PM
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
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]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:01AM (3 children)
That is exactly what the GDPR is supposed to enforce.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:56AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @07:39PM
But he is wrong on that part. The GDPR also limits data retention [privacy-regulation.eu]:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:22PM
For reference, here are some acronyms to dispel possible confusion among those of us who had trouble making it all the way through TFS:
(Score: 3, Touché) by Virindi on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:04AM (1 child)
We really need to process this data in the cloud. It is infeasible to do it on the device, we have a lot of crunching to do. So really the only option is to transmit a full data stream to our server.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:07PM
That's what they said when Mainframes were around
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM (4 children)
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.
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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:19AM (1 child)
That's what he said.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:35AM
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
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
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pav on Thursday April 05 2018, @07:30AM (7 children)
Federated services already exist as replacements for Facebook (eg. Diaspora), Twitter (eg. Mastodon) etc... All that is really needed is political will. If/when there's political will, then ISPs can can charge extra for Facebook-equivalent, Twitter-equivalent etc... and without destroying net neutrality. Everybody wins! There could even be RFCs to nail down some robust standards so servers running different solutions can talk to eachother.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @08:04AM (5 children)
How does this work? Paying extra for exactly what (without destroying net neutrality)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:27PM (4 children)
For ISP hosted services... people already get email. Just bundle social media equivalents, either in the base fee, or as extras. It gives the ISPs some extras to sell without the net neutrality BS.
(Score: 2) by letssee on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:41PM (2 children)
Methinks you need to read up on what net neutrality means. If an isp needs to differentiate traffic to facebook from other traffic it's no longer neutral.
Don't get me wrong, please tax Facebook out of existence. But the ISP's are exactly the wrong party to handle that.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:58PM
Not Facebook... We were talking about a federated Facebook equivalent (like Diaspora etc...).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by chromas on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:51PM
Back in þe olden times, some ISPs used to run web servers for customers to put up their own sites. But also, they usually host customer email and maybe usenet servers. He probably meant something like that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @05:38AM
Um, yeah; we called it 'usenet'.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:59AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Bot on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:07AM (6 children)
I am aiming to troll a bit here, but...
If RMS were a good fighter he would know that you break the enemy not by opposition with a weaker force, but by making it crash in the direction he is going.
The system uses surveillance?
MAKE EVERYTHING FUCKING PUBLIC. NO PRIVACY, STARTING FROM THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE. ABOLISH STATE SECRETS.
Privacy is just the dual to surveillance, created by the same interests. It helps the powerful. Who cares about a peon's tranny underage anime collection?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:49AM (3 children)
Poison the well.
(Score: 2) by ewk on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:38AM (2 children)
Poison? No... more like 'flooding the well'...
No more finding the needle in the haystack, but simply being avalanched by a gazillion needles.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:38PM
Lots of accounts,lots of browsers, lots of actions, and it's all bs to fill up their database with crud? Good idea
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:59PM
I think you underestimate the ability of computers to handle large amounts of data and sift through it. So called "big data" is just afternoon lunch for big computers. Even rudimentary AI of today can pattern-match its way around whatever you think you can do to befuddle it.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:12PM (1 child)
What? Whenever someone tells you We should make things worse so that they eventually get better, you can be pretty sure their ideas aren't worth taking seriously.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:19PM
Have you truly considered this alternative before saying total transparency would be worse? When internet came out I thought: "impossible. Some people will never let the internet take hold, because the amount of info shared would destroy the incumbents". Then, blatant privacy abuse of peons happened systematically and I understood what the plan was. You should, too.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:45PM
It's just the enforcement aspect of privacy laws that have been neutered through regulatory capture and general lack of interest. Change the enforcement mechanism - simply create statutory damages for each incident of a privacy breach that a citizen can file for through Small Claims Court (e.g., $5,000 / incident). At $5,000 an incident, Equifax would have have to pay multiples of their annual revenue in settlements. This will suitably incentivize companies to either protect personal data sufficiently or not collect it at all. Either way, the outcome is positive for privacy.