Richard Stallman
​​​​​​​the Vanishing State of Privacy​​​​​​​

For Stallman, the reason for this data collection is that the market has been dominated by proprietary software, which prevents users from seeing, or making changes to, the code under the hood.

“The reason that we are subject now to more surveillance than there was in the Soviet Union is that digital technology made it possible,” he says. “And the first disaster of digital technology was proprietary software that people would install and run on their own computers, and they wouldn't know what it was doing.

“They can't tell what it's doing. And that is the first injustice that I began fighting in 1983: proprietary software, software that is not free, that the users don't control.”

Here, Stallman is keen to stress, he doesn’t mean free in the sense of not costing money – plenty of free software is paid for – but free in the sense of freedom to control. Software, after all, instructs your computer to perform actions, and when another company has written and locked down that software, you can’t know exactly what it is doing.

“You might think your computer is obeying you, when really its obeying the real master first, and it only obeys you when the real master says its ok. With every program there are two possibilities: either the user controls the program or the program controls the users,” he says.

“It's free software if users control it. And that's why it respects their freedom. Otherwise it's a non-free, proprietary, user subjugating program.”

“Source code, that's like a mixture of English and math; if you've learned that programming language you can read it and understand it, and then you can change it,” he explains. “But to run it we convert it into executable code, which is very hard for anybody to understand. That's called reverse-engineering. So practically speaking, in order for users to study and change the program, they've got to have the source code.”

These two freedoms allows users to individually control their own copies of software, and tailor it to their needs, however they aren’t much use for those of us who can’t program. Which is where freedoms two and three come in, as they are designed to provide collective control, or “the freedom to work in a group to exercise control over what the program does”. 

“Collective control is the way that non-programmers can participate deciding what the program can do,” he explains. “It requires two more freedoms: freedom two is to make exact unmodified copies and give or sell them to others when you wish. And freedom three is to make copies of your modified versions and give or sell them to others when you wish.

“So when the program carries these four freedoms, the users control it, it respects their freedom, that's free software. But if one of these freedoms is missing or incomplete, then the program controls the users and the proprietor controls the program.”

Without these freedoms, he argues, software becomes a tool of oppression.

“Non-free software is an injustice; non-free software should not exist; non-free software oppresses its users and therefore I won't use it,” says Stallman. “I don't have any. I go out of my way to ensure nobody does that to me, and also, because of my conscience, refuse to help to do that to other people.”

Much of the proprietary software we use today, Stallman argues, contains malware. But not malware of the type your IT department is tasked to prevent, but code designed to harm the user’s privacy.

“Because the proprietors know they have control over users, they're attempting to mistreat users with that power,” he says. “They put in malicious functionalities. This is why the widely used proprietary programs are typically malware. And among other things, they often spy on their users.”

Here he’s taking a swipe at the major players: the makers of devices used by millions of us around the world.

“This is an example: this is Amazon's e-book reader, the Amazon Swindle. It transmits, from time-to-time, the name of the book being read and the page number to Amazon servers. If the user enters any notes, they're sent to Amazon too. Total Orwellian surveillance of the user,” he says. “I refuse to be oppressed this way: take that Swindle and step on it.”

But Amazon isn’t the only one collecting such intimate data.

“Lots of proprietary programs spy. Windows spies, Mac OS spies, iOS spies, Flash player spies. Thousands of apps spy on the user,” he says.

The proliferation of personal fitness trackers has, according to Stallman, amplified this.

As the internet of things takes off, this looks set to greatly increase this type of data collection.

“The internet of things - well I call it the internet of stings - it's a way that those companies can get power over more things in your life, snoop on more things in your life and have total power,” he says. “And they start by saying its optional, and then your insurance company says 'if you use it we'll give you a discount', and slowly that morphs into 'if you don't use it we're going to charge you extra' and almost everybody feels compelled to say yes.

“And if we apply that kind of standard to consent to sex, it would be basically defining that there's always consent, isn't there? Which shows it’s the wrong standard to apply, and it's wrong here too.

“When people are systematically pressured into saying yes, they're not really saying yes.”

One area is particularly concerned about is backdoors within software, that allow companies to remotely make changes to code or assets on people’s machines, and which, Stallman argues, allows them to “remotely attack the user”.

“The Amazon Swindle has a backdoor for erasing books. We saw this in 2009: Amazon remotely erased thousands of books, thousands of copies of the same book: it was 1984 by George Orwell,” he said. “So of course this stimulated a lot of criticism, so Amazon said it would never do this again, unless ordered to by the state. Right.

“Even if Amazon had meant that seriously, it would not be an adequate response. But Amazon didn't mean it seriously: it was just supposed to sound like a promise, supposed to take away momentum from the critics because a few years later Amazon went back to openly erasing books by force without even an order from the state.”

Then there’s Microsoft’s controversial update process, which is achieved through a universal backdoor in its operating system.

“Windows has had a universal backdoor since Windows XP: a universal backdoor means they can forcibly change the software at a distance,” he says. “It's a universal backdoor in the same sense that computers are a universal computing engine and can be programmed to do absolutely any nasty thing to the user.”

However, one of the biggest areas for concern for Stallman is smartphones, a device type that he refuses to own.

“And with the backdoor they can convert it into a full-time listening device that can hear all the conversation in the room, even when it's not making any call, even when it’s supposed to be switched off.”

For Stallman, this is reality that the architects of the Soviet Union would have loved.

“I call this Stalin's dream: this is what Stalin would have yearned for,” he said. “But the point is: Stalin couldn't do that: it was too far-fetched even for him to dream of. But this is what's happening today.”

This might sound concerning, but there’s more: this is just what we know about. As all of this software is delivered as an executable, there is a considerable amount of software that little is known about, as researchers have been unable to discern exactly what it’s doing.

“Those programs are malware. But there are a lot of other proprietary programs that may or may not be malware, we don't know. We're unable to find out,” says Stallman.

“This is a situation that's a recipe for corruption, so of course power corrupts. The developers of proprietary software face this temptation, and a lot of them are corrupt, and the rest we don't know about.”