[PiN-diskusjon] Richard Stallman: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe (fwd)

[Thomas Gramstad]

---------- Forwarded message ----------


A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

Richard Stallman

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance


Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of 
Facebook data 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/31/big-data-lie-exposed-simply-blaming-facebook-wont-fix-reclaim-private-information> 
could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could 
happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.

Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/facebook>. Deeper, meaning to advance 
from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because 
surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, 
and requires powerful measures.

The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For 
freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so 
many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one 
that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly 
regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection 
Regulation <https://www.eugdpr.org/> or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems 
from collecting personal data.

The robust way to do that, the way that can’t be set aside at the whim of a 
government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a 
person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect 
certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.

Data about who travels where is particularly sensitive, because it is an ideal 
basis for repressing any chosen target. We can take the London trains and buses 
as a case for study.

The Transport for London digital payment card system centrally records the 
trips any given Oyster or bank card has paid for. When a passenger feeds the 
card digitally, the system associates the card with the passenger’s identity. 
This adds up to complete surveillance.

I expect the transport system can justify this practice under the GDPR’s rules. 
My proposal, by contrast, would require the system to stop tracking who goes 
where. The card’s basic function is to pay for transport. That can be done 
without centralising that data, so the transport system would have to stop 
doing so. When it accepts digital payments, it should do so through an 
anonymous payment system.

Frills on the system, such as the feature of letting a passenger review the 
list of past journeys, are not part of the basic function, so they can’t 
justify incorporating any additional surveillance.

These additional services could be offered separately to users who request 
them. Even better, users could use their own personal systems to privately 
track their own journeys.

Black cabs demonstrate that a system for hiring cars with drivers does not need 
to identify passengers. Therefore such systems should not be /allowed /to 
identify passengers; they should be required to accept privacy-respecting cash 
from passengers without ever trying to identify them.

However, convenient digital payment systems can also protect passengers’ 
anonymity and privacy. We have already developed one: GNU Taler 
<https://taler.net/en/index.html>. It is designed to be anonymous for the 
payer, but payees are always identified. We designed it that way so as not to 
facilitate tax dodging. All digital payment systems should be required to 
defend anonymity using this or a similar method.

      An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much
      security encourages an unjust state

What about security? Such systems in areas where the public are admitted must 
be designed so they cannot track people. Video cameras should make a local 
recording that can be checked for the next few weeks if a crime occurs, but 
should not allow remote viewing without physical collection of the recording. 
Biometric systems should be designed so they only recognise people on a 
court-ordered list of suspects, to respect the privacy of the rest of us. An 
unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages 
an unjust state.

The EU’s GDPR <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gdpr> regulations are 
well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because 
its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful 
to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data 
useful for something.

The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the 
collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have 
become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). 
Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that 
required 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/29/londoners-wi-fi-security-herod-clause> 
users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then 
again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users 
ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.

To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.

Finally, don’t forget the software in your own computer. If it is the non-free 
software of Apple, Google or Microsoft, it spies on you regularly 
<https://gnu.org/malware/>. That’s because it is controlled by a company that 
won’t hesitate to spy on you. Companies tend to lose their scruples when that 
is profitable. By contrast, free (libre) software is controlled by its users 
<https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html>. That user 
community keeps the software honest.

Richard Stallman is president of the Free Software 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/software> Foundation, which launched 
the development of a free/libre operating system GNU

/Copyright 2018 Richard Stallman. Released under Creative Commons NoDerivatives 
License 4.0/