especially now that we're in the middle of one of the biggest crisis our generations have faced in the past 100 years so is the coronavirus epidemic has shown that giant tech companies can use stand resources to help out in a crisis situation and that's undeniable i haven't seen that well i mean i haven't seen them yet but i don't them the main thing that they're doing right now is helping people spread insane lunatic rumors that are starting from the president of the us who is basically the saboteur in chief acting just like a lot of rebellious chieftains that told their followers my magic will make you invulnerable to bullets well trump is telling his followers. you're invulnerable to coronavirus and they expose themselves and some get sick and

they die and he says it didn't happen no you have points there can i just give us examples of what i meant when i sat that you know they help for instance when people were in lock downs and still like a lot of countries are getting 2nd waves right now and people feel more comfortable staying home if they can work on distance so you have amazon for instance delivering goods food. utilities things that you need. a ball because they track you you know. if i were concerned only with my physical safety i might use those services too but i do find safety in a broader way it includes my health it also includes my freedom and my privacy and therefore i never use those disservices that require people to identify themselves and they do it to get food delivered that way you have to give you have to identify

yourself in order to pay you can't pay cash and then you have to give your address to and that's more information that i then i want the supermarket to have about me so i go to a supermarket wearing a mask of course and keeping my distance from people and i pay care and then i carry my groceries back and this way. i am not having data about me put in a database because the only data the only personal data that isn't about you that isn't a threat to you is the data that hasn't been collected is a distraction to talk about protection of data in the databases because the real way to protect your privacy is make sure that data isn't collected about what you do or where you go or who you talk with or what you say to them.

so we're going to be talking all the problem around whether people should be choosing between safety and privacy but let me just. not a choice privacy is part of safety remember one of the biggest dangers these days is political safety safety for instance from governments that are repressive or authoritarian and cruel and if the more they know about what people are doing the more dangerous they are collecting data is part of their technique for repression and then there are the movements anti truth movement such as you could find many governments supporting and they benefit from digital systems to targeting a adds to people is dangerous and it's based on knowing a lot of things about people well facebook doesn't know very much about me

because i've never been a sucker. ok you know i see your point about facebook but i still want to hear your opinion for instance about something like zoom or face time a lot of people around the globe where able to keep their jobs by communicating and doing meetings and brainstorming and just working once the all those. that they didn't use free software you know there is free software freedom respecting software is what that means i don't mean it's gratis that's not the issue that society issue. but it. is not a freedom respecting program it does what the company decides and the users can take it or leave it but unfortunately in especially since march many users have been put in a position where the option of leaving it means giving up their jobs why would you know i never used zoom i don't use non free software i don't the loud onto my

computer if someone says to me i'd like you i'd like to speak with you but it has to be with him i say that is out of the question i suggest the following other program we could use a freedom respecting program that's controlled by the users not by some one powerful entity and if they'll accept that then i can talk with them but those that don't accept that i can't talk with and i declined because i'm protecting my freedom and my freedom is part of my safety. was what the record is turning the united states into i don't think people here will be very safe. ok here's another question that concerns the bigger picture coming out of endemic so the partnership between corporations and the governments has grown and closer as

a result of the common effort to keep things functional in abnormal times so when governments develop an even closer partnership with let's say google right and will use google's resources for public services will you stop using public services as well because i mean they'd be contaminating the data. no although it does cause me concern you know there are some reasons why governments need to know some things about people the government needs to know my income and your income in order to tax us properly now the u.s. government doesn't try to operate fair taxation it taxes most people too much in rich people far too little but even if that were fixed government would still need to know how much money each $1.00 is making and how much money each company is making if if the government were to try to taxi's companies properly it would need to know data so it's not always wrong that the government gets data about people

but each thing that it gets has to be justified in fact governments especially for their repression agencies are collecting a lot more data about people over and over we've seen the united states government and i presume the russian government collect data systematically on dissidents protestors and so on and it's this is been happening for decades so the most sensitive data about you are where you go who you meet. and what you and the other people say to each other these are is a saying that must not be spied on and any systematic attempts to spy on them must be stopped so consider for instance clearview ai which has

a face matching service is collected photos of hundreds of millions of americans i think and then it will match photos you take a photo on the street. it'll match it another next 2nd you take another photo suppose it's a video camera it's taking photos all the time and you could match every photo that shows up and the government could be doing this i'm sure some agencies are agencies that don't hold our freedom in very high esteem so this should be absolutely illegal people must be allowed of course to take photos from time to time you know suppose you watch agents of the state arresting somebody and cracking sticks over his head a well you should be able to make a video of that but to do this systematically. in lots of places

all the time that has to be legal because it will lead to is a society where no one can meet anybody else in private and we see what that's like we see it in. where the waiters are being oppressed in this complete fashion so fundamental freedoms are at stake when we limit the collection of data by digital systems and so no i don't think that those systems are helping people. an anon free program since the users don't control what it does you've got to assume it's designed to do near city things and in so many cases we have evidence specific evidence that a non free program is designed to do specific nancy things if you want to see hundreds of cases look at good new dot org slayer's malware richard when i take

a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking with richard stallman digital privacy activism the founder of the free software movement talking about whether we should be choosing between safety and privacy statement. you. can ask our vendor is darker alfonzo and mongering here's daryn there's cherishing page he's dard servo and there are. his 1st words were at a lower sr a challenging post you've got 2 years to live. i

have no doubt that what happened was scriven a. let's concentrate market is a $1000000000.00 industry these companies have a huge financial motivation to solve these problems there are numerous documents showing that doctors who are keen to test facts are a concentrates for the insights of its own that patients won't give them doctors the wrong place to play golf our current system why that would keep me from secure those years. on people still. being. so many. wall street financial engineers it's. the rand corporation more than 50 trillion dollars so.

incredible. to me that's why wages are not keeping up. we've got inflation raging. in the story. if you're born into a poor family if you're born into a minority family if you're born into a family that only has a single parent that really constrains your life chances. generational poverty. it's a fight every day to meet your needs and the needs of your family.

and we're back with richard stallman digital privacy activist and the founder of the free software movement talking about the fact what i wish should be choosing between privacy and safety so richard there are calls for trust busting in washington aimed against a big stack in the most radical scenario do you think the tech giants should be broken up i mean how can this be done and wanted damage to digital ecosystem will ready got in place. i don't see anything you know most of that digital ecosystem is unjust and i'd like to get rid of it and i don't use it so i have i don't think it's doing any good i won't use it because the

impositions are unacceptable the terms of service are often unjust controlling and i say no to them i never agree to such a thing without reading it you know and often it requires you to run a non free program and i won't ever run a non free program on my computer so there are websites i can't talk to and. we need to do more than just break up close companies i'm not convinced that you know breaking up the largest companies would reduce their power to that extent it would be a good thing and we need to do that in all fields in the past 20 years or so we have seen enormous consolidation of businesses in the us often there are just 2 main businesses in a field and those your choices and. i think we should.

amp up antitrust to the we've got 20 or 30 substantial businesses in each field if that's if there are not that many it starting to be in. that's too much domination by business if we want companies like. amazon so on to stop collecting data about what people were doing. just breaking them up is not enough you know if we had $100.00 smaller companies in place of google and each one collected data at each one contributed to the misuse of that date by several competing ad tech companies it would still be unjust and the government could still collect all that data silently at any time with national security letters so we wouldn't be safe either from targeted ads or

from government tracking of dissidents so what we need is to prohibit designing systems so that they identify people and record what people do. in the new project the operating system project i started in 1983. we have developed a program for anonymous payments called good new tollar now the payer is anonymous but the store that you're paying that's identified so taler can't be used for tax evasion that was one of its goals but you can pay for something and the store you're paying can't tell who you were so as long as the rest of the system also doesn't identify you and we need lost and new protocols to make sure it can't you'll be able to buy something digitally anonymously and if you buy something

else tomorrow it will be impossible to tell that you were the one who bought both but here's the funniest thing. it really seems like it's only now during the corona time step people have become seriously aware and concerned about their digital privacy i mean it's been there forever you could have thought of optus or and there are people who thought it was not in masses and i wonder why haven't we traded our personal data for a conference a long time ago and and more imply. a presence has increased times fold because of the damage isn't it too late to worry. what you mean we white woman i want. people privacy for conveniences. i have been. you can people for this terribly foolish practice for decades.

but i couldn't get people to listen to me. i went around saying this is an abomination you must stop and people of mostly ignored me and some people understood my arguments you know i'm not tasking people to take this on face you can check points and recognize the validity of what i'm saying but the companies have engineered situations where the inconvenience of saying no for one person is so high that most people won't say no and it's the fact that others are not saying no that keeps almost everybody in line you have to be willing to go against that pressure as i do and then you can say no so when they claim they're not actually forcing you well literally speaking that's true you're not being forced to have

a facebook account you're not being forced to have a google account you're not being forced to have a microsoft account all over you want to buy a new windows machine and log on it you're almost forced to have to make a microsoft account but you can say no to all of these things. but we need to make it easy for people to say no that's the reason why i developed the good new operating system because it was you know to say no to non free software in 1983 you had to have no computer well in 1983 most people had no computer but of course computers became more and more common and normal own and but by then we had the good new plus linux operating system which made it not too to run a computer and say no to all that non free software that's the point making it

easier to say no less of an inconvenience to say no so more. people will say no but since 2000 since 2000 or so mobile computing has developed and it's just from the very roots you can't install any free operating system on an online monster or on most android devices is just impossible the hardware is designed so that you can't so once you accept those devices there are a few android devices that are possible to liberate i should point out. but then you can't run the non free apps that people used to do most things with them so. it's going to be hard to reclaim freedom and we're going to have to work at it but as people recognize from examples like shinji on.

what repression digital systems lead to i hope people will start fighting and saying we won't tolerate systems in our streets in our homes that can't possibly track what we're doing who we talk with who we go see. we have to have laws against those systems here's another question of course less start to think about my personal data being collected yes i don't like the fact and i understand that it can be used to manipulate my behavior and influence my opinions i know that and so it can be used to arrest you yes absolutely and some thinkers that i spoke to during this uneasy times told me that they may be ok with their data being collected as long as they know for what's do you think transparency could work here i mean wouldn't you

be ok with giving your personal data if you knew exactly how it is going to be used . well how could i know such a thing i could hear what somebody tells me it's going to be used for how do i know that it won't in fact be used for other things that's a much harder problem in many cases i would accept the collection of certain data for certain purposes but i would always ask the question why should we trust you there are not very many governments i would trust to know things about me and trust them to use that data only for the good purpose that they have stated because i know that so many governments are tracking people and trying to pretend they're not and repressing some people you know this comic from demick is actually only spitting out what we already have and that is the digital ization

of everything and in many for us as gas stations you can't even seal up a tank without a credit card anymore it's hard to be in touch with people if you're not on ses book and what's worse is you don't have an e-mail so here's the question are we having it into a reality where using digital technology would be sort of mandatory not by law but by a spirit of time. there is a danger of that of course i think it's an exaggeration to call that digitalisation of quote everything unquote but certainly many things and enough to make it dangerous and i call for laws against that i don't think it should be lawful for a gas station not to accept cash i don't think it should be lawful for a food store or restaurant not to accept cash so he you know you know what you're

talking about basically is the reversal of the trend. absolutely if the trend is dangerous we must reverse it but how can it be done on praxis now that everyone sort of done that and it's going and we know how to stop it you know it's so easy to look at how hard this task is and give up. but i succeeded at supposedly impossible tasks before when i started developing the new operating system some of my friends said oh yes this is what we need but it's hopeless it's too late the job's too big i give up they didn't even try to help because they gave up fortunately some of my other friends and some strangers said yeah i want to help and we got it done thousands of us and it is possible therefore to reverse dangerous trends that there are

a lot of dangerous trends in the world one of them is. greenhouse gas emission you know if we don't reverse that trend and pretty damn fast then civilization may collapse under all the fires droughts crop failures floods diseases civil wars you know globalized manufacturing may not work anymore because a civil war over there and one place you don't normally think about prevents the production of food widgets and there's no way to make any any more for 2 years but and meanwhile during that time 5 other things can't be made and suppose no computers can be made and nobody knows how to live without computers so it could all crash but even bigger than that there's an even bigger trend that we

also must defeat and that is pew takhar see the tendency for the rich to control governments such that democracy is a sham now this is the situation in the united states a study determined that since the late ninety's public opinion no longer correlates with the federal government policies they seem to be determined entirely by 2 things what rich people want and what the special interests in any particular issue want well that's not democracy and that's why we've been unable to get things like a national medical system a green new deal. and various other things that people almost all want but the politicians keep opposing and one other at one aspect of to talk or see is of course the influence of money in politics the ease of destroying

a candidate with false rumors distraction campaign. they're all tools of to talk recy you know. some people worry that russia will manipulate the us election through facebook and twitter one sure it's trying to but i'm even more scared of the rich americans who are doing even more of that so. you know we have these horrible trends and we have to reverse them somehow and the paradox is the only reason it's hard is because each of us thinks i'm alone what could i possibly do or even i in my 10 friends what could we possibly do but if you try sometimes your effort grows and grows so you must try. richard on that optimistic note i want to thank you

for this wonderful chat that we had means you gave me a lock to ponder about and i hope that our viewers will also. have something to think about and decisions to make up for this interview and this talk of our spank you so much and good luck with everything. thank you very much. join me every 1st week on the alex simon sure and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics or business i'm show business i'll see you then.

time after time corporations repeat the same mantra sustainability it's very important it's accelerating the transition to sustainable transport sustainability . a more equitable and sustainable world. they claim their production is completely harmless. the big. companies want us to feel good about buying their products while the damage is being done far away and this is something i'll just want any minute i mean what. we didn't. understand so when. 6 guys or financial survival go. when customers go by you reduce the price.

well reduce and lower. that's undercutting well what's good for market for the global economy. in the headlines this 25th from this registers a new daily coded record as the number of cases processed 16000 of the last 24 hours for the government's fresh antivirus measures approaching. the trial narrowing time u.k. volunteers could soon be deliberately infected with cove it in the world's 1st human vaccine trials of their colleagues sparking ethical concerns. other major world carmakers trumpeted ministration over what they dubbed an unbounded unlimited trade war with china. and a license to kill british spies might secure legal protection to commit crimes following ongoing battles over limit.