Richard Stallmans standpoint about openmoko

[t3st3r]

Simon Norberg wrote:
> Hello,
> I mailed Richard Stallman a while ago regarding a few things including 
> what he thought about openmoko and his answer was:
>
> I could endorse it if they get rid of the plan to use non-free
> software for the GPS.
>
> I don't think the answer surprise anyone, but atleast we know for sure 
> now. And i really hope we can replace the non-free GPS software as 
> soon as possible or atleast before the public release.
>
> Regards
> Simon Norberg
>
As for me, I'm have to ask few "unfair" questions.
1) Why there should be some closed-source daemon which does some unknown 
things?And why should I trust it, if I have no idea what it does?
2) As I understand, to fully use features of AGPS I should send some 
data to some server over network, without really having any idea what 
they will do with these data, if they will collect them for later use 
and if my privacy protected here or not.As far as I can understand I 
can't set up my own server to connect it via secure channel and hence to 
ensure that privacy level and data handling policy is acceptable for 
me.Right?

Of course it is possible to do some sort of tracking with GSM and there 
is nothing you can do about it (you have to announce network about your 
presence to be able to receive calls, if network has no idea where you 
are, incoming call will fail with "the subscriber is not available at 
this moment...").But GSM-based tracking is low-precision (something like 
500meters wide ring around serving cell or in worst case, cross of 
500-meter wide rings if more than 1 serving cell were used) and only 
possible when phone calls, transfers data, etc.GPS allows to do much 
more high-precision tracking and this seems to be somewhat unfair idea 
to send gps data to some server without really having idea what they 
will do with these data and which data collection policy is really in 
effect.

Sorry for being paranoid a bit.