Ben Finney bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au writes:
With the freedom to study and improve the program (freedoms 1 and 3), and the freedom to send the program to someone else if they're more capable to help you (freedoms 2 and 3), these already secure the freedom to decide which data is shared where.
What the article seems to be talking about is outside the scope of software freedoms. The four freedoms are needed by the software user.
When the user abdicates their freedom to the entity that runs the service, demanding more software freedoms is not going to address that. Those freedoms don't help the user, if the user isn't the one who gets them.
Instead, the problems discussed here are more directly addressed by URL:http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street-statement/ the Franklin Street Statement on freedom and network services.
Specifically:
Service providers are encouraged to:
* Choose Free Software for their service.
* Release customizations to their software under a Free Software license.
* Make data and works of authorship available to their service’s users under legal terms and in formats that enable the users to move and use their data outside of the service. This means:
* Users should control their private data.
[…]
Users are encouraged to:
* Consider carefully whether to use software on someone else’s computer at all. Where it is possible, they should use Free Software equivalents that run on their own computer. Services may have substantial benefits, but they represent a loss of control for users and introduce several problems of freedom.
* When deciding whether to use a network service, look for services that follow the guidelines listed above, so that, when necessary, they still have the freedom to modify or replicate the service without losing their own data.