[email protected] wrote:
Stallman's definition of SaaSS excludes search engine. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html :
Yes, and thanks for pointing that out. I find that article to be a good description for a lot of today's computing. But I don't find that to be terribly detailed about how things could be organized better for society. I don't expect such articles to cover foreseeable futures in that degree of detail; articles like these are valuable because they're written for a mass audience of novices. The issues articles like these need to explain are complex enough (particularly for anyone new to thinking about such issues) without having to also explain how services could be better organized.
In other words, that is a good description of how things have been and are now but not what could be. The privacy implications of "looking through their collection of data" are profound, particularly for things one doesn't intend to publish (which would distinguish editing Wikipedia articles from searching Wikipedia articles) which could very well be done more privately than it is today (as I explain elsewhere in this thread). This change in how searching is done places searching more squarely in the realm of service as a software substitute (SaaSS).
Also, as another poster points out in this thread, even today's searches (where your queries are fed to another computer) could be done more privately than they are today with the most popular search engines. Unfortunately, as far as I know, such privacy claims are unverifiable because they involve "looking through their collection of data". No matter what claims to privacy searcx, Startpage/Ixquick, or any other organization offers I can't be sure my searches aren't being used only to provide me with hit lists and are completely inaccessible to anyone for any reason without my explicit per-use consent. The only way to be sure is to never provide that exploitation opportunity in the first place.
