Richard Stallman Quotes

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?

The users are not going to be in the position of accepting what's been collected; they're going to be in the position of being able to demand collection.

So many commercial orgs have software where you can come and modify it, but they still control everything. And what's controlled is very clearly what's good for their business, or if they're more progressive, their view of what's good for the Internet.

And the user may have a higher comfort level deciding what information to provide rather than worrying about what inferences might be made from what they've gathered.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?

Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

People are just beginning to learn how much their own personal privacy is being invaded and that they’re losing control over their own information.

I eventually think its going to be the consumer who controls his own data.

What if in a permission-based structure, you could decide if you wanted to provide value to advertisers or to political groups? Or, for instance, share your medical data for cancer research? All those options should be available for an individual to make.

What is clear is that users own their data and should have control of how their data is used.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

When a handful of tech giants are gatekeepers to the world's data, it's no surprise that the debate about balancing progress against privacy is framed as 'pro-data and, therefore, innovation' versus 'stuck in the Dark Ages'.

The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it 'out there.'

I've always shied away from online data storage. I don't even use my employers' network drives for anything sensitive. I want to control access myself.

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.

Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.

If your data is out there earning money for somebody, you should have a say in it.

When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.

It is the fate of operating systems to become free.

As individuals, we have very little say about how our data is being used. I'm not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that, as an individual, if I'm the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it's going to be used.