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How people use the tools you make is none of your goddamn business. If they want to tell you, they’ll tell you. If not, keep your fucking nose out of it.
If this sounds like the opposite of what design theory tells you (“user research”, etc.), it’s because it is. That’s because design theory is anthropological and colonial in nature.
Non-colonial design is possible and necessary.
@aral what? sorry to be a killjoy, but If I make knives I think I have a right to refuse to give them to people that want to stab someone. If someone stabs a person with my knife, I have every right to take the knife back. And if I make software, I think I have a similar right to not have it used in, say, any military, even though that case is a bit more difficult since it is trivial to make a copy.
@lukas You have every right to limit who uses the things you make. You have absolutely zero right to spy on how they use it and violate their privacy.
@aral Would you say it is ok to ask? Do you mean you have no right to check what they use it for within the range of use you have licensed it for? sorry for being pedantic I will leave it at this, but some of your toots just come across so vile that I had to ask.
@lukas @aral No, you don't have a right to restrict the users in how they use the software. It's the basic freedom: the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. Please don't make an analogy that compares digital objects to physical ones. If I make a copy of your program, we both have the program. If I take your knife, you don't have a knife.
@sarahsapphire @aral I used the physical/digital comparison, because it seemed to me that @aral used the word tool deliberately to mean both, but I might be wrong. I agree that they are different, and admit that I am torn about it, but I am in no way ready to let my software run on killer drones, even if I agree with free software ideology otherwise.
@lukas
Hmm...not if ownership is to have any meaming.
If I buy a car, it's not the manufacturer's business where I drive with it.
Unless it's a Tesla, of course, in which case it's Tesla's core business.
Think of everything you own. Would you give the manufacturers, vendors of all those things permission to track what you're doing with them and come after you if they claim you violate some rule? @eldaking @aral - 1/2
Would you even attempt to read the licence agreements for all those things?
"that wasn't meant for this" Is one of the stupidest sentences I've had to hear throughout my childhood. Dude, was that cotton bush *meant* to become your ugly shirt? Who decided that? And how did you know?
@eldaking @aral @lukas - 2/2
@Mr_Teatime @eldaking @aral
Yeah I get it, and if it is about a mega corp and the completely out of whack power relation you have to them, I agree. My grievance is that I dont think you can generalise as far as the toot does. Dont let the current corporatocracy set the bar for how we relate to people in general. It is cool and sounds smart to have very basic principles as arguments against megacorps, but dont throw the baby out with the bathwater.
@lukas
If I saw a knife on offer, with a tracking chip and a licence agreement which stipulates what I may use it for and that it will be taken back if some unaccountable entity claims I violate the terms ...
fuck whoever made that knife.
Stabbing people is already illegal. Spying on everyone for an excuse to repossess what you already sold, while making customers pay for being spied on is a very Orwellian thing.
@aral To elaborate upon this, the contemporary idea that software can only be improved if there is telemetry in the background is false. A lot of software improvement happened before telemetry became common or was even possible.
Telemetry as typically used is more about targeting people with ads, data brokering sales and optimising cloud infrastructure. To decide what apps to include as distro defaults you can run a poll, or do something like Debian's popularity contest which is opt-in.
Don't assume that people automatically consent to having their operating system version and "unique identifier" sent to all and sundry.