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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 October, 2018, the pages in this directory list around 350 instances of malicious functionalities (with more than 400 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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Until 2015, any tweet that listed a geographical tag sent the precise GPS location to Twitter's server. It still contains these GPS locations.
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In the game Fruit Pop, the player buys boosts with coins to get a high score. The player gets coins at the end of each game, and can buy more coins with real money.
Getting a higher score once leads the player to desire higher score again later. But the higher score resulting from the boost does not give the player more coins, and does not help the player get a higher score in subsequent games. To get that, the player will need a boost frequently, and usually has to pay real money for that. Since boosts are exciting and entertaining, the player is subtly pushed to purchase more coins with real money to get boosts, and it can develop into a costly habit.
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The Microsoft Telemetry Compatibility service drastically reduces the performances of machines running Windows 10, and can't be disabled easily.
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Amazon Ring “security” devices send the video they capture to Amazon servers which save it permanently.
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The Weather Channel app stored users' locations to the company's server. The company is being sued, demanding that it notify the users of what it will do with the data.
I think that lawsuit is about a side issue. What the company does with the data is a secondary issue. The principal wrong here is that the company gets that data at all.
Other weather apps, including Accuweather and WeatherBug, are tracking people's locations.
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