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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 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.