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Christine Hall of FOSS Force has interviewed Richard Stallman with a series of seven questions. The interview wraps up with a question about LLMs and a question about service as a software substitute which leads to a discussion about digital surveillance.
Let’s contrast this with traditional systems of age verification to see how much worse this is. When you buy alcoholic beverages, a store clerk will ask to see your ID, but won’t record your identity, only take note of your age. That practice respects your privacy; its surveillance impact is null. But digital age verification systems record who you are, and precisely everything you do.
At 73 years old, I am sure all the sites that do age verification would rule I am old enough. But doing the age verification would give them my name or an ID number, and I refuse to give them that.
Because of my age, I am entitled to a discount card for the Boston trains and buses. But the card would record my identity every time I board a subway train or bus. I would rather pay full fare than submit to that.
I don’t own a car, or want to, but we need to stop cars from reporting where people go. I hope to find a mechanic who will work out how to convert connected cars into “disconnected cars.” I think it could be done by wrapping some sort of metal sheets around the antennas that transmit privacy-violating data, or receive GPS. Or perhaps just unscrewing them. To do navigation, use a stand-alone GPS receiver that isn’t connected to the car’s surveillance system.
One of the dangers of tech companies storing your personal data — and personal data about you — in their servers is that agents of repression can get that data from the company without even informing you.
For more about digital surveillance, see
https://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.
One long-running theme which RMS emphasizes is that software freedom remains a moral issue.
Previously:
(2023) The Four Freedoms and The One Obligation of Free Software
(2018) Happy 35th Birthday GNU!
(2018) RMS on a Radical Proposal to Keep Your Personal Data Safe
(2017) The Free Software Movement is Barking Up the Wrong Tree
(2017) US Court Upholds Enforceability of GNU GPL as Both a License and a Contract
(2015) GNU Prophet Richard Stallman Calls Windows and MacOS Malware
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday September 03, @12:33AM
Wiping your drives or destroying your own phone is perfectly legal unless you know that law enforcement is actively looking for whatever is on those drives (e.g. receiving a subpoena). Otherwise, they're your drives, you can delete data off them, run them over with your car, use them for target practice, or hit them with a sledgehammer. And there are lots of completely innocent reasons to do this sort of thing, e.g. to comply with data privacy regulations or contractual promises.
As for turning off my car's tracking: I just want to minimize power usage for things that have nothing to do with me getting from point A to point B. Or because I didn't want my wife to potentially learn that I frequented a sleazy by-the-hour motel. Or because I was tired of scammers using the fact that I entered a particular state in their scam attempts.
We should not be trying to turn legal activities into crimes just to make law enforcement's life easier when they want to ruin somebody's life, nor should we on juries automatically accept prosecutor's explanation of why certain things happened.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin