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GNU Operating SystemProprietary Software Is Often Malware
Proprietary software, also called nonfree software, means software that doesn't respect users' freedom and community. A proprietary program puts its developer or owner in a position of power over its users. This power is in itself an injustice.
The point of this page is that the initial injustice of proprietary software often leads to further injustices: malicious functionalities.
Power corrupts; the proprietary program's developer is tempted to design the program to mistreat its users. (Software whose functioning mistreats the user is called malware.) Of course, the developer usually does not do this out of malice, but rather to profit more at the users' expense. That does not make it any less nasty or more legitimate.
Yielding to that temptation has become ever more frequent; nowadays it is standard practice. Modern proprietary software is typically a way to be had.
As of April, 2019, the pages in this directory list around 400 instances of malicious functionalities (with more than 450 references to back them up), but there are surely thousands more we don't know about.
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Users of proprietary software are defenseless against these forms of mistreatment. The way to avoid them is by insisting on free (freedom-respecting) software. Since free software is controlled by its users, they have a pretty good defense against malicious software functionality.
Latest additions
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As of April 2019, it is no longer possible to disable an unscrupulous tracking anti-feature that reports users when they follow ping links in Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, Microsoft Edge and also in the upcoming Microsoft Edge that going to be based on Chromium.
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Data collected by menstrual and pregnancy monitoring apps is often available to employers and insurance companies. Even though the data is “anonymized and aggregated,” it can easily be traced back to the woman who uses the app.
This has harmful implications for women's rights to equal employment and freedom to make their own pregnancy choices. Don't use these apps, even if someone offers you a reward to do so.
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Microsoft has been force-installing a “remediation” program on computers running certain versions of Windows 10. Remediation, in Microsoft's view, means tampering with users' settings and files, notably to “repair” any components of the updating system that users may have intentionally disabled, and thus regain full power over them. Microsoft repeatedly pushed faulty versions of this program to users' machines, causing numerous problems, some of which critical.
This exemplifies the arrogant and manipulative attitude that proprietary software developers have learned to adopt toward the people they are supposedly serving. Migrate to a free operating system if you can!
If your employer makes you run Windows, tell the financial department how this wastes your time dealing with endless connections and premature hardware failures.
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Volkswagen programmed its car engine computers to detect the Environmental Protection Agency's emission tests, and run dirty the rest of the time. In real driving, the cars exceeded emissions standards by a factor of up to 35.
Using free software would not have stopped Volkswagen from programming it this way, but would have made it harder to conceal, and given the users the possibility of correcting the deception.
Former executives of Volkswagen are being sued over this fraud.
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Google tracks the movements of Android phones, and sometimes saves the data for years.
Nonfree software in the phone has to be responsible for sending the location data to Google.
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