Criticism of violating people’s privacy is not limited to a particular organization or individual. If any service (etc.) violates users’ privacy rights, it should be criticized. Doesn’t matter if it’s libre, proprietary, governmental, or private. People’s privacy should be respected no matter what service you’re providing or how your service is working. If you can’t respect people, change your service and if you can’t change it then stop.

We should all agree that most people in the world don’t know how their private life and privacy is being violated and there’s some people that spread disinformation in support of these services. We should also stop calling these data-hungry companies “services” because what they provide is a platform to steal people’s data and it’s not a service.

We don’t encourage people to stop using Google because we don’t like Google (I mean we don’t like it but it’s not the point), we tell people stop using Google because Google and other similar evil corporations are violating people’s rights (and that’s why we don’t like it). If a free software service tracks people or violates people’s privacy rights in any way, it should be criticized too. We should not have double standards or differentiate between services; specially when it comes to libre services as such services may create a bad impression of free software among users.

I’ve talked about it before many times but as I see this happening again and again, I write it here too. Most of free software services are provided by individuals or small teams/collectives that are generous enough to spend their time and money to help society be more free and secure. We should know that nothing is free; we may not pay for these services but the maintainers are paying to keep their software/serivce up. They pay for servers, domain names, developing costs, and some other stuff.

Some people may not be able to donate or help developing these libre software/services but the thing we can do is to avoid causing more costs for the maintainers. It’s actually pretty simple. Just don’t create an account on a libre service/software if you don’t need it. This can reduce the amount of data that those maintainers should store/handle on their paid server and this can help their service cost less.

I encourage you to share this note (or a similar one) with your friends to help these service providers.