If well-informed people have voted that way with their wallets, or otherwise, then I agree and of course that's their choice.
However, my big concerns with a lot of modern technologies are firstly that non-geek users don't understand what they are really signing up for and secondly that even if people do understand what they're signing up for it doesn't matter if effectively the only choices available to them all have the same problem.
I've lost track of how many friends and family have said just-plain-wrong things about what social networks do with their data, for example, or think that posting some comment on their Facebook page about how they don't consent to it will actually have any practical or legal effect.
And to pick on another example that's been much discussed recently, it won't matter that you have security and/or privacy objections to your car spying on you and phoning home with your location 24/7, if insurers are all offering car makers serious money to install those features, and since drivers are often required by law to have motor insurance they have no choice but to "opt in" if they want to drive at all. At that point, there is a complete failure of competition in the market, caused by the artificial distortion of having actual laws that constrain even well-informed people from making the choices they might otherwise prefer to make. We are fast heading that way with general computing as well, where for practical or even legal purposes we are required to do some things on-line, yet the only tools being offered to get us on-line come with these strings attached.
I have an email address or two or more. Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Apple, Microsoft, etc. all have nodes in their graph irrespective of my use of their products or services. They have all read some fraction of my emails. There's location data on me going back potentially 18 years since I got my first cell phone. There's potentially IP logs going back to 1993 when I first went on the internet. I'm possibly in direct mail databases dating back to the early 1970's. Following the graph may lead to all last year's credit card charges of someone I worked with in 1987.
Windows 10 is a tempest in a teapot. It's removed the illusion of anonymity for some people. Not staying logged into Facebook just affects the ads that appear when I turn on JavaScript to see some web page. It doesn't remove my node from the graph. It doesn't even mean I'm leaking significantly less information, it just means that what I'm leaking is different.
Everyone thinks they're sophisticated. They're correct. The people collecting data are sophisticated too. That's why they brought an AFV to the shoving match. Running away from the firepower effectively means living the digital life of Stallman. Networks are networks because every resource announces its presence.
Running away from the firepower effectively means living the digital life of Stallman.
Writing as someone who has been the victim of a data-driven screw-up and spent several months of having life turned upside down while trying to fix it, I am increasingly wondering if Stallman has been right all along.
More practically, privacy is not a binary measure. We all interact with other people and organisations, and data gets shared as part of those interactions, and often there's nothing inherently wrong with that; some degree of communication is both desirable and inevitable. That doesn't mean we should just give up and condone covert collection, arbitrary sharing, and unrestricted use of personal data by whichever disproportionately powerful organisations can get hold of it.
For example, Facebook can't effectively follow me around the web. I have installed simple browser plug-ins that mean it is not technically possible using the usual techniques like phone-home Like buttons. The sites I visit would have to actively and covertly send data about my visit to Facebook behind the scenes, and most sites aren't going to do that.
For the record, I do also have a problem with the likes of Google being able to operate a mail service that is actively scanning things I wrote or even blocking messages I've sent to colleagues, which they can do if a recipient of my message uses their service. In effect, they have co-opted someone else to provide data I might have sent that person in confidence, just as mobile apps scan my name and number from a friend's address book often without even their knowledge never mind mine. (Of course that kind of action is probably already against the law in my country, but that doesn't matter very much unless the relevant authorities have the resources to enforce that law effectively.)
I believe almost everything is better when essential infrastructure is neutral and serves a specific purpose. Organisations like Google don't so much blur that line as totally erase it, and because I have no way to know that I am participating in their system in the first place, in practice I can't even choose not to send that e-mail to that recipient. I'm sad that Microsoft now appear to be joining that group.
Privacy is a cluster concept. Implicitly, it includes the idea of constraints on others. The most effective constraint is that others simply don't care and that's most of what privacy boils down to accept in a few corner cases covered by legislation and the existence of legislation implies that in those cases others do indeed care and hence the legal restraint.
It is clear that Stallman was and is right in regards to the technical dimensions. It's not like we can go back to the time when email was private. STMP never was, that's why Stallman chose his course so long ago. Email is more private today thanks to STMPS. The same is true for HTTP/HTTPS. But even in the old days, there was nothing to prevent someone from publishing your love letters in the school newspaper. It was just more difficult.
Privacy generally breaks into security or anonymity. The issues surround either authorization and identification. Both have always been mostly limited by interest more than anything else. Computers have reduced the cost of being interested and so long as we use computers the djinn isn't going back in lamp.
Privacy generally breaks into security or anonymity.
Privacy is much more general than that. It is about having control of what information about you is shared, who has that data, and how it can be used.
The legal protections for privacy cover a lot more than just a few corner cases as well, but they lag behind what technology can do in 2015 and need updating.
Living the Stallman lifestyle is fantastic if you embrace minimalism. It's definitely doable with ARM and MIPS chips, along with (actually secure) cloud storage and encryption.
Should you feel the need to use evil apps like Facebook or Google+, make sure the 3 or 4 account names are random (but pass their filters), and that you make sure LOTS of people use those same accounts. Just understand that social media is a drug, and you are a drug addict.
However, my big concerns with a lot of modern technologies are firstly that non-geek users don't understand what they are really signing up for and secondly that even if people do understand what they're signing up for it doesn't matter if effectively the only choices available to them all have the same problem.
I've lost track of how many friends and family have said just-plain-wrong things about what social networks do with their data, for example, or think that posting some comment on their Facebook page about how they don't consent to it will actually have any practical or legal effect.
And to pick on another example that's been much discussed recently, it won't matter that you have security and/or privacy objections to your car spying on you and phoning home with your location 24/7, if insurers are all offering car makers serious money to install those features, and since drivers are often required by law to have motor insurance they have no choice but to "opt in" if they want to drive at all. At that point, there is a complete failure of competition in the market, caused by the artificial distortion of having actual laws that constrain even well-informed people from making the choices they might otherwise prefer to make. We are fast heading that way with general computing as well, where for practical or even legal purposes we are required to do some things on-line, yet the only tools being offered to get us on-line come with these strings attached.