Re: Privacy Concerns with UbuntuPhone

Kia ora koutou

Thomi, it might be bad vibrations in my tinfoil hat (nice image BTW ;)
but I can't help but feel your responses here are coloured by bad
feelings resulting from my harsh words about Ubuntu and the Amazon
Lens etc some month back. I welcome the UbuntuPhone, and the work you
folks are doing, just as I welcome Android, Replicant, FirefoxOS and
all the other free code mobile OS you mentioned. I understand that all
of these teams are constrained by an oligopoly of hardware
manufacturers, as I said in my first email on this topic, and network
gatekeepers, as revealed by this discussion (again, thanks to everyone
who's chipped in).

I'd like to think you're pushing the software freedom boat out as far
as you can, at each stage of development. Mind you, it does make it
hard to give you the benefit of the doubt, when you engage in a flurry
of fallacies (ad hominem, false binary, strawman etc) in defence of
the proprietary components of your employer's product, rather than
saying something like 'yes, we are concerned about the proprietary
baseband, and we will continue to push for a fully open stack until
our influence in the mobile industry (combined with that of other free
code OS teams) is enough to achieve it'.

Worik and Katinka have already addressed your false binary on
security/privacy (since it can't be perfect it's not worth worrying
about). It's true that software freedom is not an ironclad guarantee
that software is privacy-respecting, secure, and bug-free. What
software freedom is usually pretty good at though, is making sure that
software does not have malicious functions built in as 'features',
such as sending an endorsements for the device I'm using, to everyone
in my address book, purporting to be from me. This may not send my DNA
to the NSA, but it's still highly undesirable. This kind of
profit-motivated malware is prevented by using devices running free
code software, because such software can be swapped out for a
non-malware fork or alternative.

As for the surveillance state, again you're right that there's no
ironclad certainty of privacy. The more authoritarian the state, the
less privacy there is. However, there's a big difference between the
effort involved in stealing my handheld and cracking into it, and
passively harvesting my data through backdoors hidden in proprietary
components. Technologists can't (by ourselves) prevent authoritarian
states, but we can certainly design our technology so that it serves
user freedom and democracy, and frustrates invasive authorities as
much as possible. This is basic social responsibility in engineering.
http://citizenengineer.org/

Protecting our privacy and security from our government may seem a
fairly theoretical concern in Aotearoa for most people (for now).
However, I can't overlook the fact that friends and colleagues of mine
were spied on for two years and arrested on completely fabricated
charges in Operation8. No convictions except for four counts of being
collectively in the presence of some old hunting rifles without a gun
license, charges which would have been dropped like the other 14
people's were (due to illegal state surveillance according to the
Supreme Court), if not for the trumped up criminal gang charges, on
which they were not convicted. Then there was the DotCom raid. The NZ
state is not always gentle with those who threaten elite interests
(whether its fossil fuel mining and monocrop forestry oligopolies, or
proprietary software and copyright oligopolies), however
non-violently, and we need to remember that old quote about freedom
and eternal vigilance.

On 22 April 2014 17:48, Thomi Richards <[email protected]> wrote:
>> only when it's turned on eh? It must be old :) <<

Until a libre handheld is available, I use the oldest phones I can
find which still work.

>> I'm assuming that we'd all rather have a third player in the mobile market (whether it be Canonical or someone else) than keep the existing two players in power? <<

At the end of the day, I'm not the least bit interested in the number
or the power struggles between proprietary vendors. Until you resolve
the proprietary baseband limitation, you are essentially a
subcontractor to proprietary vendors, as are Android, FirefoxOS, et
al.

>> Regarding closed device drivers, this isn't a new situation for Linux either - 15 years ago it was very hard to buy a desktop computer that didn't rely on proprietary drivers <<

Yes, but this is not mandated by your ISP. Bit of a difference. Alex
has covered this point beautifully with his road/car/driving analogy.

>> If you want to make any real positive changes here, I can see two approaches. One is to improve the software we already have, particularly the crypto stack. <<

I'm a user and an advocate for users, not a programmer. It's a bit
hard to convince people that the participation of non-coders is valued
in open source communities, when we keep getting told that to
contribute we need to "improve the software".

>> The other is to lobby government for fairer and clearer legislation around when, where, and how surveillance is permitted. Maybe, once those things are sorted, the next task will be to tackle device firmware. <<

I'm already active on the this second bit through my work with the
Pirate Party, giving advice to the ICT spokesperson for the Greens,
networking with activists from Mana, Internet Party, and other parties
and organisations. In fact this is why we're having this conversation.

You missed the third approach though, which is to support vendors who
can provide a usable product that respects my software freedoms and my
privacy, even if their product is not the prettiest or whatever. This
is one way I use what little influence I have to push vendors towards
greater respect for software freedom. It's up to the vendors who are
developing devices, and encouraging people to use them, to decide
whether they care about these principles, or my custom (which
admittedly doesn't add up to much $).

Hei kōnā
S

-- 
Daniel Strypey Bruce
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"Voting... is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The
last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will
get a version of it through a dessicated question, and then will
submerge it in a Niagra of similar opinions, and convert them into -
what else? - another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of
impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which
you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you
can do nothing."
- Neil Postman, 'Amusing Ourselves To Death'

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