What did you think making programming widely available was going to do? Did you think nation-states and their bloated bureaucracies would magically step in and go full North Korea about privacy to protect us from you?
This accountability-denying pearl-clutching HN does every time they see an OSINT technique is ridiculously predictable... and only demonstrates your culpability in creating this mess in the first place.
Open Source Software is a solution for the problem of companies writing bad software under the assumption that no one will bother finding bugs if they are too annoying to find. History proved that wrong.
There would be no point in doing any of that if you wanted the data to be freely available too. If so, you could just publish your database as a read-only file, and call it a day. Or just forgo any accounts at all.
It literally makes no sense to blame OSS for privacy problems. The last I checked, Google Search is not open-source... These are two completely separate issues.
You seriously cannot find a single correlation between the mass availability of programming talent which extracts and transforms data, the vast majority of Internet hardware and servers being at least 70% powered by open source software, and the unstoppable destruction of privacy made possible by said infrastructure?
Open source made Internet hardware affordable for mass use.
Mass use of Internet hardware destroyed privacy.
Even at its peak, 1950s IBM didn't have enough money in the world to violate privacy the way Google does. And the only reason Google can do it is because it stands on the infrastructure of Internet servers that were able to proliferate to the point of pennies per megabyte due to open source code.
Yes, open source code is DIRECTLY responsible for the economics that has made the destruction of privacy endlessly cheap.
Even in your example, the effect from Open Source is at least two steps removed.
The problem you are referring to has more to do with Moore's law than open source software. Let's take IBM in the 1950s. Renting the use of a 701 from IBM would have cost $15000 per month. In today's dollars, that would have been about $1.8 million per year.
How exactly would you propose that IBM in the 1950s actually convince the world's population to use a computer at all, let alone using one to keep track of all of their conversations? OSS didn't make that change, cheaper silicon did.
HN: yaaaaaay
2020: open source all the intelligence!
HN: Now hold your horses, mister
What did you think making programming widely available was going to do? Did you think nation-states and their bloated bureaucracies would magically step in and go full North Korea about privacy to protect us from you?
This accountability-denying pearl-clutching HN does every time they see an OSINT technique is ridiculously predictable... and only demonstrates your culpability in creating this mess in the first place.