Video download link | md5sum cbd00fd9fa8f0202e13b7d5fa7bbc1be Emacs and Microsoft Issue Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: An attempt to study another Gemini client resulted in a disturbing revelation; Unless something went very wrong, it seems like GNU Emacs doesn't exercise caution with users' privacy; it leaks out information to Microsoft in its Web browser mode

IT WOULD BE lovely to be proven wrong and nothing would please me more than realising I had done something wrong (before I recorded this video), but on the face of it DuckDuckGo is wired into Debian's build of GNU Emacs. Well, maybe specific to this distro and version of it, but maybe the settings come from the 'upstream' package, just like qutebrowser in Debian 10. Does GNU not understand that DuckDuckGo means Microsoft servers serving Microsoft "results" (censorship) and ads while leaking users' data to Microsoft? That's what has been happening for over a decade; it's hardly news that DuckDuckGo is a de facto Microsoft proxy.

"GNU Emacs is like the crown jewel of GNU or at least of Richard Stallman (it predates the GNU Project)."The video above concerns Elpher, which I still study for an impending review. It's just that I lost interest in Emacs the moment I saw Microsoft in it.

GNU Emacs is like the crown jewel of GNU or at least of Richard Stallman (it predates the GNU Project). Sending users' activity to Microsoft is very antithetical, hence a breach of trust. I first used Emacs more than 20 years ago (for coding); back then it didn't attempt to integrate a Web browser. ⬆

Does not respect your privacy