I love RMS but I'm not holding my breath waiting for any government laws to protect me.
For what it's worth, neither is RMS, if you've read about how he uses the Internet.
Let's keep building the free software tools so anyone can easily get the level of privacy they want for whatever they're trying to do. We've made so much progress but there's still so far to go.
Do not to look UP to authority for hope - look AROUND at your fellow citizens working hard to bring free privacy software to everyone - that's who's going to fix this, because no one else will.
One of the problems is that the software you run on your own computer hasn't been the major source of privacy concerns in a long, long time. That isn't to say that software on your computer doesn't track you, but it's dwarfed by the amount of tracking and privacy issues that you need to compromise on to use the vast majority of the internet.
It's noble and laudable to take the same stance towards freedom and privacy that RMS does, essentially check out of the modern internet, and reduce your web usage to calling wget on a shell, but that's not a workable solution for the vast majority of people.
Give me a break, is this not classic fallacy of making "perfect" the enemy of "better"? With an attitude like that, things never improve.
Privacy protection exists along a gradient. Just because one does not want to sit at the far end with RMS does not mean we just throw up our hands and say "well, I guess I have to give up all my privacy, because I can't do what RMS does."
And as I said, there's still a lot of work to do. So let's get to it and stop the nay-saying!
I'm not arguing that at all - precisely the opposite, in fact. I'm saying that so long as we put privacy in the hands of end users and don't hold service providers responsible (the point I was replying to), we more-or-less cripple our ability to utilize the internet that exists today.
We can use strong end-to-end encryption to evade snooping middlemen. Beyond that, we hold service providers accountable by not using their services if they are not willing or able to provide the security and privacy we require.
If you want an authority to hold them accountable, you are just shifting your trust from one entity you have little/no control over, to another entity that you have little/no control over.
Look around, not up. An authority will not solve this. We must solve it, together.
For what it's worth, neither is RMS, if you've read about how he uses the Internet.
Let's keep building the free software tools so anyone can easily get the level of privacy they want for whatever they're trying to do. We've made so much progress but there's still so far to go.
Do not to look UP to authority for hope - look AROUND at your fellow citizens working hard to bring free privacy software to everyone - that's who's going to fix this, because no one else will.