There is a story going around the newswires that iTunes contains spyware that sends information about your music listening to Apple. (iTunes is the software interface to iPods.) Many articles are commenting that there is a trade-off: your personal information is not personal, but you get better music suggestions from Apple.

This does not have to be the case. First, the sending of your data could be optional. Second, you could have control over who the data is sent to and what data is sent.

There are two reasons why these things that could happen are not happening. They are about consumer helplessness. One reason is that Apple uses technical means to prevent iTunes users from being able to look at or modify the behaviour of the software (they distribute machine-readable binaries and withhold the human-readable source code). Another reason is that Apple uses legal means (copyright) to prohibit anyone that manages to fix the software from helping other computer users (which someone could otherwise do by distributing that fixed version).

The ubiquity of digital technologies and networks today poses questions about how to protect society's privacy. Over and over, free software is the best solution I see to many of these problems. People should have a right to study, modify, and redistribute the software that they use.

Sometimes, when I meet other activists, they ask me what I do, and I never have a good answer. I usually say something vague about building support for things among policital groups, and assisting other campaigns that need help and that are doing things that benefit free software, but then the person asks "Yeh, but what's your day like?" ...but I don't have an average day to describe.

A friend suggested using my blog to send a few notes about each day, so I've taken it as my new year's resolution and here I am. There's a load of mundane stuff as well, like any job, and internal discussions, but here are some of the other things I did in the last three days.

Wednesday

• Talking to different people about organising events in Belfast, Dublin, and London. One large event is certainly happening in Belfast in March, in IFSO we are considering trying to organise a follow-up event for May in Dublin, and I've been invited to give a talk in London at the start of April so I'm looking into organising another event in London to coicide with that. One idea was an international event for Fellows.
• Some coordination work for a new part of the Fellowship site which is not announced yet.
• Sent info to the discussion list about the new GNU project for making a Flash player: Gnash.

On Thursday

• Got the fsfe-ni mailing list set up for Northern Ireland, put an entry in the FSFE newsletter about it, and informed the Belfast GNU/Linux users group.
• Gave some help to a group of people who are considering taking over the GNU package that I maintain: GNU acct. I am looking to hand over to someone else because I am no longer an active programmer.
• ...and I made the hard decision that I will attend the GPLv3 launch conference. This means that, like anyone wanting to enter the the USA, I will have to submit to being fingerprinted. A second issue is that my government will be required to hand over a lot of data about me to the government of the USA. The government of the USA has promised to keep that data private, and to only use it for fighting terrorism, but the ink was barely dry when they were caught breaking that agreement. It seems to me that the USA was a terrible choice of venue, but I have decided to go, so I will now focus my thinking on making the most of this trip and the conference. My expenses are being paid by the hosts.

Today (Friday)

• Interfacing and coordination between the European Commission, FSF, and FSFE regarding the GPLv3 conference.
• Enquiring as to whether I have the papers etc. for travelling to the USA. (I do.)
• Blogged about what I do :-)