Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do? [LWN.net]

Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

Posted Dec 8, 2012 0:06 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
Parent article: Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

I guess we need to add another freedom to the 4 freedoms:

"The freedom to trust that the program will not report any detail of you activity to a remote site without explicit permission".

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The right to not be reported

Posted Dec 8, 2012 17:21 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Expressing it as a "freedom" does not make it clearer. I think it is better left as a trust: "The trust that the program will not report any detail of you activity to a remote site without explicit permission". Obviously, any program that violates that trust can be changed using freedom 1 (and distributed using freedom 3) without the annoyance. The trust you mention is like the community around software: not a freedom but something additional.

Perhaps as a right it works:

The right to keep your activity private without explicit, opt-in permission.

The right to not be reported

Posted Dec 10, 2012 5:55 UTC (Mon) by davidescott (guest, #58580) [Link]

> The right to keep your activity private without explicit, opt-in permission.

Firefox ships with "do not track" set to a default "off" state, requiring that users turn it on in order for it to be effective. In other words Firefox is operating under and opt-out model.

Furthermore Firefox requires that you install add-ins like Adblock manually instead of incorporating them into the browser.

Firefox even supports Cookies a known means of monitoring and tracking user behavior.

Almost all Linux distributions ship TOR as an optional package and one has to "opt-out" of the larger government and corporate monitored internet.

Somehow none of those seem as bad, presumably because we draw a distinction between actively participating in an activity that detracts from privacy, than simply turning ones back on a third parties violation of ones privacy, but given a number of comments in RMS' letter I don't think that turning ones back is an acceptable moral position to RMS. Among his comments:

> To protect users' privacy, systems should make prudence easy: when a local search program has a network search feature, it should be up to the user to choose network search explicitly each time.
> A network search feature should also inform the user clearly and concretely about who will get what personal information of hers, if and when she uses the feature.
> If a sufficient part of our community's opinion leaders view this issue in personal terms only, if they switch the surveillance off for themselves and continue to promote Ubuntu, Canonical might get away with it. That would be a great loss to the free software community.
> If we can only say, "free software won't spy on you, unless it's Ubuntu," that's much less powerful than saying, "free software won't spy on you."

That said GNU has its own fork of Firefox that does more to protect privacy, so he could point to that and say "I don't advocate for the use of Firefox," but if that is the case it would be more fair to bring that up instead of focusing on Canonical.

Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

Posted Dec 8, 2012 22:43 UTC (Sat) by cyanit (guest, #86671) [Link]

The issue here is the lack of a requirement to make trademarks free as well.

This allows Ubuntu to abuse his trademark power to give more visibility to his crippled distribution compared to variants lacking the antifeature in question.