Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2017/02/13/Turow.html

I encourage all of you to either listen to
or read
the transcript of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Joseph
Turow about his discussion of his book “The Aisles Have Eyes: How
Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, And Define Your
Power”.

Now, most of you who read my blog know the difference between proprietary
and Free Software, and the difference between a network service and
software that runs on your own device. I want all of you have a good
understanding of that to do a simple thought experiment:

How many of the horrible things that Turow talks about can happen if there
is no proprietary software on your IoT or mobile devices?

AFAICT, other than the facial recognition in the store itself that he
talked about in Russia, everything he talks about would be mitigated or
eliminated completely as a thread if users could modify the software on
their devices.

Yes, universal software freedom will not solve all the worlds’ problems.
But it does solve a lot of them, at least with regard to the bad things the
powerful want to do to us via technology.

(BTW, the blog title is a reference
to Philip
K. Dick’s Minority Report, which includes a scene about
systems reading people’s eyes to target-market to them. It’s not the main
theme of that particular book, though… Dick was always going off on
tangents in his books.)