Hacker News Reader

Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

> After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches...

I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. I remember thinking that it seemed totally insane. But in light of the reality of 2018, I am coming around. The way I see it, I can keep tweaking privacy settings in a browser, or opting out of collection, or doing any number of other things to attempt to protect my privacy, _or_ I could just stop using services that do not respect my privacy in the first place. Perhaps certain aspects of modern life have taken too much, and they need to be abandoned until they are reformed?

View on HN

> I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back.

One of these you mean?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515

[2] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

It was directly related to #2, but I only made it there as a result of reading some other article. It has been a while and I don't remember the source.

I agree. I'm coming around to some of his view, and no longer see him as quite so extreme. Still think he weakens his message with the alternative language, like "used" instead of user etc. Always have.

The difficulty of course is right now it's nearly everyone at it. Too early to say if GDPR will make an appreciable difference, though it seems like it should. So that leaves few choices outside of gnu everything or layers of hacks and browser extensions. I have hope that many services will start being much more careful in what tracking and data they actually need after recent events.

The irony is that everyone knows a bit too much about RMS and exactly how he behaves online or in interviews. His efforts at privacy have backfired.

RMS’s efforts are not for not privacy as some absolutist doctrine: no one must know anything about me. Instead they are about freedom: people should know about me what I let them know about me; I am in control of my data and my online presence. We know lots about RMS’s internet habits specifically because he shares them with us using free and open services.

He's put his own special RMS twist on the classic 'vagrant in the library' model of internet use, taking it a step further by shunning browsers entirely and not using cellular devices. IIRC, he does explicitly mention privacy as being one of his motivations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com