Stallman: GDPR is well-intentioned, but it won’t ‘save’ privacy

The surveillance we are under today is many times greater than that in the Soviet Union. If we care about freedom and democracy, we should largely eliminate it. There are so many ways to harm people using data that the only secure database is one that has never been created.

– Therefore, instead of a new EU regulation that prescribes how personal data may be used, I propose a law that would completely prevent the collection of personal data if the basic function of the system can be performed without it, suggests Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, advocate for free and open-source software and broader rights to privacy.

>>>GDPR: The deadline for implementation is approaching, are you ready?

According to Stallman, the EU regulation GDPR is well-intentioned but does not go far enough. It will not achieve much in terms of privacy because the rules are too lenient. They allow the collection of any data if it is at all useful to the system, and it is too easy to find a way for any data to be useful for something.

– GDPR boasts about the requirement for users to give consent for data collection, but that will not bring about any significant change. People who develop software and other systems have already become experts in producing consent, as Noam Chomsky would say. Most users agree to the terms before reading them. We have an example where a company in an experiment set a condition that by connecting to their public WiFi, users would waive their firstborn. And they succeeded. Therefore, we need to radically rethink what and how we want to retain privacy as a society, concludes Stallman in a comment for Guardian.