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Comment by throwaway729 | Hacker News Reader

> it is not a solution for people to simply stop using e.g. Gmail.

I strongly disagree with this part. For example, if you think the primary problem with GMail is user privacy, then the only solutions are legal or technical. And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service.

The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale. The solution to that problem -- one that's been demonstrated effective time and again -- is to make purity utterly pragmatic.

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The problem with this is incentives. Without the profit motive, and without revolutionary support programs like the ones Stallman imagines, people simply have got to pay rent somehow. And FOSS, as Stallman describes it, does not pay rent. So programmers end up working in proprietary applications, often building up on top of FOSS or Open-source to build better user capture and lock-in and winning the market share.

The incentive was supposed to be access to a growing library of copylefted code. But we somehow abandoned POSIX in favor of a half-assed scripting language where a critical mass of desirable code doesn't exist yet.

>And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service.

Could you elaborate on this? The idea of the law protecting peoples' privacy is not really new or untested. I don't think you need to be anywhere near what I would call draconian to be able to protect peoples' privacy legally.

Hm, thanks for making me think more about this.

I still don't think GMail could've come into existence without the carrot of user data. Maybe now that it does exist Google has a vested interest in keeping people inside its platform, which would mean my statement is incorrect.

Maybe I'll just weaken my statement to this: I think a GMail replacement would be far easier to achieve than a strong legal framework protecting users' privacy.

GMail is GMail because of spam filtering and search. There can be no such thing as GMail that respects your privacy, because without the spam filtering and search efficacy that come from huge training datasets, you have just another Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Zimbra installation.

I guess that depends on what you mean by privacy.

I tend to define privacy in terms of an intersection of users' expectations and preferences -- data should be used how users expect it to be used, and those expectations should match their preferences.

For example, a particularly voyeuristic user might truly prefer -- independent of any transactional considerations -- for marketers to know a bunch of intimate information about them. In that admittedly entirely fictional case, the modern web isn't a privacy violation.

My point is that it's possible to use data for a particular purpose without violating users' privacy expectations and preferences. There are both legal and technical mechanisms that enable these sort of use cases.

I think it's fair to say that most people expect and are perfectly OK with google using their email to filter spam and improve search. Therefore, I don't consider those use cases to be privacy violations.

Also, although search and filtering are two huge features GMail, even a GMail without those features would be quite superior to Squirrelmail/Roundcube/Yahoo! accounts with tiny data limits (which really were the alternatives when GMail launched).

The problem is, under the current legal framework, if Google has access to the data for any reason then so does the government.

The only way to protect your users from the government is to not possess (or be able to make sense of) their data at all.

>The problem with Stallman's approach is only that his purism doesn't scale.

That's why there are some organisations that fight for the right for people to buy a computer without Windows installed-by-default and get the money reimburse if they opt-out of the OS package.

Isn't there an hardware company called puri.sm by the way?

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