RMS: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? 264
Covalent writes "RMS describes how much surveillance is too much (hint: it's all too much) and how to combat, circumvent, and prevent future surveillance. How much of what is suggested is plausible? How much is just a pipe dream? Discuss!"
The article contains an extensive list of things we do that give too much data to centralized organization, and offers solutions to combat all of them. From the article: "The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us."
Re:How much privacy does RMS need? (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny, I saw him speak at HOPE in New York years ago, and he did none of that and was a rather upstanding guy.
I even directly asked him a question and he was perfectly polite and not crazy at all.
Re:More than you can provide or articulate (Score:5, Interesting)
In this instance, for the first time in many years, I agree with RMS. I now believe companies should retain the minimum possible data about customers, and lets solve the usability problems that come from that separately.
Don't like to re-enter your credit card and shipping info every time you buy from Amazon? It's just not that hard to solve that problem without Amazon keeping your data.
Recommendation engines? It's just not that hard to solve the problem of finding other products like this one without keeping customer data (remember when Netflix and Amazon had "lists" where customers would volunteer to group like items together - that was great!).
Targeted advertisement? Does anything think that has worked out well, rather than just being creepy and still failing to get the "time" aspect of targeting right?
Sure, I can accept that there is still info that a company needs to accumulate to do business well, especially for subscription-based businesses, but just like we now code with "least privilege" in mind, can we not also code with "least customer data" in mind?
Re:More than you can provide or articulate (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll never understand the hate for RMS entirely. As far as I've seen in several videos and interviews he actually seems fairly level headed. He seems to understand very well that what he chooses to do is his own personal belief. He thinks that belief adopted by others would be better for those individuals, but he's not trying to cram it down anyone's throat. At least I personally, after watching a few hours worth of his videos feel that way.
He definitely is a bit pretentious ("I wouldn't even accept an iBad as a present"), but the guy graduated magna cum laude at Harvard, and then went to MIT (to not finish his degree.) It would be hard not to be a little pretentious, and have more than a bit of an ego.
At least he's not Torvalds.