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Comment by rbarooah | Hacker News Reader

Many of Stallman's complaints about Facebook ( http://stallman.org/facebook.html ) apply equally to Google.

Does anyone know whether he regards them in the same light?

If you follow the first link on the page you linked to there ("I don't use it") there is a brief discussion of his view of Gmail and Google+:

"As for Facebook and Google+, I reject them on principle because they require people to give their 'real names'. I am proud to identify myself when stating my views; I can afford to do that because I am in a fairly safe position. There are people who rationally fear reprisals (from employers, gangsters, bullies, or the state) if they state their views. For their sake, let's reject any social networking site which insists on being told a user's real name... Google+ says it will offer to hide the user's real name, but demands people prove an 'established identity' or provide ID. I am suspicious of this requirement, but not sure what it will mean in practice..."

"People sometimes ask me to recommend an email service. The two ethical issues for an email service are (1) whether you can use it without running any nonfree software (including nonfree Javascript code from the site), and (2) whether it respects your privacy... Last I heard, Gmail was satisfactory on issue 1, and probably so are many others. On issue 2, I have no way to verify that any email service is satisfactory. Therefore, I have no recommendation to offer... However, I can suggest that it may be wise to use an email service that is not connected with your search engine. That way you can be almost sure that your email contents don't influence your search results. You shouldn't identify yourself to your search engine in any case."

Arguments against the Real Name policy are valid if all your thoughts, opinions, and actions all funnel through that one social network. In reality, however, there are many alternate forums for expressing your views with varying levels of anonymity, and I think that's a good thing! The freedom to choose anonymity between forums is great. I'm glad that certain networks stick to a real name policy.

This is not quite correct. It's not a binary. The existence of one weak alternative network wouldn't be enough. We need an actual plurality of active networks.

These issues are real when you have large organizations like Google and Facebook who stand a reasonable chance of extinguishing a significant part of the diversity.

One problem with the privacy-protectionist view is that half of my email recipients use one of the three major email services (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail), so even if I decided not to use them, half of my email would end up on their servers. Taking that into consideration, and adding the fact that I haven't found an email service that I've liked within an order of magnitude of Gmail, it doesn't make sense to boycott it. You just have to assume that the email providers are reading your messages and act accordingly. Some things I talk about over email, and some things I don't.

Only half?

(I wish I was joking.)

Does it really matter? As much as I agree with rms on the matter, I don't want him to become the High Judge of what's good and what's evil.

Wanting to know his opinion doesn't make him the High Judge.

I'm curious because slthough I'm critical of Google for various reasons, I think it's hard to make a case against the value that Google search has brought to the world.

In the particular thread about Facebook RMS is pretty absolute in his boycott. I wondered whether he'd be more nuanced with Google.

Take a guess:

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=stallman%20google

Most of that seems to be aimed at ChromeOS - which is predictable.

I'm more interested in what he thinks of Google as a service.

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