 One of the big stories in tech of the last few days has been the story that the latest version of Mac OS big sir that it's spying on its users that it's basically just a gigantic piece of spyware It's spying on everything that the user does and then it's phoning back home to Apple and reporting that information back to Apple Who then collects that information and does who knows what with that information, right? They could probably sell that information to other people and make a lot of money doing that, right? and People have asked me what my thoughts on this or you know what I comment on this story And I've resisted actually making a video on this the last couple of days because I didn't really think I had much To offer on this because this is nothing new really to anybody that's been following my channel You know I talk about free and open-source software versus proprietary software all the time But the more I think about this there is an aspect of this We do need to talk about because other than just being free and open-source software versus proprietary software The problem here isn't the licensing right the problem here is that for some reason we the user We have become okay with allowing software to spy on us And it doesn't matter whether it's free software or proprietary software But especially proprietary software has this telemetry in it, right? That's the buzzword telemetry Telemetry is just a code word for surveillance, right? It's just another name for what it really is. It's not telemetry It's surveillance, right? It's a way to let that software spy on you and proprietary software Especially has surveillance in it oftentimes without you even knowing about it So it's really the proprietary surveillance. That's the problem and you see this in proprietary software proprietary operating systems such as Windows Mac OS Mobile operating systems like Android Nio s a Chrome OS, you know all of these proprietary operating systems They are tracking everything you do. They are spying on you. You are not the user. You are the used They are using you they're taking information from you, right? They're they're data mining you and then they're taking that information and doing who knows what with because you don't know It's proprietary software and matter of fact most of the time You don't even know you're being spied on and that's what really shocks me is like when I tell people that Windows 10 is spying on them They're like, what do you mean Windows 10 is spying on? How do you know and? They're right. How do you know because it's proprietary closed-source software? You can't audit the code Do you really know Windows is spying on you? You don't know what it's really collecting I mean, I guess you can track some of the stuff going on on your network You can figure out that Windows is phoning home But what's it really sending back to Microsoft and then what's Microsoft doing with that information? Of course, you have absolutely no idea about that that really highlights the difference between free and open source software and proprietary software because at least free and open source software if they're gonna add telemetry to a piece of free software They typically tell you about it because there's really no pointing them not telling you about it because the source code is out There you're gonna see what that piece of software is doing to you anyway They might as well be upfront about it and say hey, we're gonna collect some information about you Hey, are you okay with that and typically people in the free and open source communities are not okay with that But at least these free and open source projects ask you before they start spying on you now me personally I don't think telemetry belongs in any piece of software Now I know why some people add telemetry to their software even free and open source projects Even many Linux distributions add a little telemetry because they want to know what kind of software most of their users are running You know what kind of equipment they're using what kind of screen resolution They're using this and that and the other thing and I get why that information might be usable I still don't like the idea of even free and open source software adding telemetry I don't think it's a good idea, but if you're gonna do it at least yeah Let people know hey we want to spy on you is it okay give them an option to opt in it should always be opt-in too It should never be opt-out opt-out telemetry is Absolutely immoral and evil. I don't care if it's in a piece of free and open source software or proprietary software You should never have to opt out of being spied on I think that's just disingenuous And I've seen some free and open source software do this before is automatically opt people in to telemetry And they know that it's just a really shady practice and we the community really need to start calling out those free and open source Projects for doing this, but really the real problem is the proprietary software It's the proprietary surveillance going on because many people Billions of people around the world right now are using pieces of software that are spying on them right now at this moment And they have absolutely no idea about it Many people don't realize the danger of using a proprietary web browser and this one is Especially troubling to me because I get sometimes that people need to use these proprietary Operating systems like Windows or Mac because it's required at their school or required at their work. I get it I really do but no one should ever use a proprietary web browser There's simply no need to do that. Why are you using Google Chrome? You know Google Chrome is recording everything you do and sending it back to Google, you know, they're doing that So why are you using that browser yet? Google Chrome has something like 80% of the market share as far as web browser market share that blows my mind Don't use proprietary web browsers like Google Chrome or opera Safari or the Valdi or Microsoft Edge because you know Microsoft Edge is phoning home back to Microsoft everything you're it's got telemetry built into it Right, it's proprietary surveillance. Why use a proprietary web browser to when there's so many good free and open-source web browsers Like we've got a million free and open source web browsers that are really really good things like Firefox and Brave or those of you That like Chrome try un-Google chromium It's free and open source Chrome with all the Google bits ripped out And I think that is a smarter choice than actually using the traditional proprietary Google Chrome Billions of people around the world right now don't realize other than the web browsers themselves the websites are also spying on you Right, and you can't trust some of the non-free code that's being executed on these websites that you're visiting Things like non-free JavaScript, for example, right disable JavaScript You know if you go to a website that has to have JavaScript to run Maybe think twice about using that site or if you have to use that site then enable JavaScript just for that site But yeah, get rid of JavaScript, you know flash on these days flash is not much of an issue flash is kind of dead technology But years ago so many websites, you know use flash and that was a major security problem as well spyware problem You know a lot of people now are even bugging their own houses with these listening devices like the Amazon Echo and You have your phone sitting here all the time and you know that microphones open You know right now my Android phone Google is recording everything I say to you guys and you know that they're listening You know there's spyware and all of your connected equipment in your house your smart TV is spying on you Your smart watch is spying on you the operating system. That's running in your modern vehicles That's spying on you the one that really blows my mind when when I mentioned this to people is that video chat Video conferencing software if it's proprietary software Guaranteed it's spying on you. So I'm talking about proprietary video chat platforms like discord zoom Teams Skype, it's all spyware. It's all recording everything you say and it's recording the video If it has video chat and I'm sending all this stuff back to somebody, you know, it's collecting information trust me on that it's collecting information and Really what bothers me about the video chat thing is even if these pieces of proprietary Software didn't have this built-in telemetry and weren't spying on you Video chat should never be assumed as being private anyway because you're chatting with somebody else anyway You don't know what that person's doing. They could be recording that conversation Always assume on any kind of video conferencing platform that nothing you say is private I mean whether it's free software or proprietary software, nothing is private But especially if it's proprietary software, you don't know what the maker of that software is doing with that conversation You're having now what's really interesting this talk about telemetry or surveillance is as I'm gonna call it is that you know Surveillance is it does not violate the definition of free software the definition of free software has four freedoms, you know and Adding telemetry adding surveillance to a piece of software does not in any way Violate the four freedoms as defined by the free software foundation So you can actually have telemetry in a piece of free software It doesn't violate the licensing or anything the same thing with the open source definition, you know The OSI defines open source by meeting 10 different criteria Adding telemetry Surveillance to a piece of software does not invalidate it from being open source software as defined by the OSI So really this is not an issue necessarily of free software versus proprietary software Because the idea of telemetry being added to software kind of it's a separate argument And it's one we need to start focusing on this one We need start focusing on within the community people like me that have a platform I need to start speaking out more on it and other people within the free and open source software communities start needing to maybe highlight the issue that is telemetry and maybe we need to redefine what free software is Maybe we need to redefine what open source software is because in my opinion I don't think a piece of free software to meet that definition of being free software should have spyware in it I think that should invalidate it, right? I think anybody that adds any kind of surveillance to any piece of software, you know, that should automatically Disqualify it from being free software or open source software It should automatically be classified as proprietary if it has any kind of tracking or telemetry built into it And I know I'm gonna get trashed in the comments for what I just said because I'm gonna get people Oh, not all telemetry is bad Some people are collecting all this information through telemetry for ethical reasons moral reasons and I get that it's kind of like Proprietary software. It's not like when I tell you people don't use proprietary software when there's free and open source solutions It's not because all proprietary software is doing evil things to its users. Many of it It's not doing anything to the user that this that's negative in any way But some of it is and the same thing with telemetry. Yeah, you're right Some people are doing telemetry the right way, but most software is not doing telemetry the right way They're not telling the user that they're collecting that information They're not sharing that information with the user and then they're not telling you what they're doing with that information who they're selling that information to So as long as most people are playing that game Yeah, I'm just gonna group all telemetry as being bad now before I go. 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