@kaia rms isn't bothered about proprietary software that doesn't run on his computer or do his computing, although he points out the owner of such computers should be doing such computation with free software for their own freedom's sake.

rms doesn't like uploading his private information unencrypted onto someone else's computer mind you.

I hold similar views - although I realize that certain things being proprietary indirectly affects me, even if such isn't my computer or doing my computation.


With the blood testing machines, the problem isn't merely that the machines runs proprietary software, it's that your blood contains a lot of information about you that should be private and shouldn't end up in the wrong hands and there's a chance that the software in a modern blood testing machine is designed to send such information specifically into the wrong hands (as there really isn't any consequences for producing a machine that does that unless such spyware feature can be undeniably proved).

Even if the testing machines themselves don't contain spyware and actually just test a blood sample of unknown origin and print a tag of the type, a lot of hospitals/clinics send test results through spyware operation systems and mail servers like windows and outlook.

Furthermore, a lot of the time the test results are sent over insecure channels like SMS (<identifiable phone number> Hi <name>, your blood test on <x date> turned out to be <blood type>).

Really, the usage of proprietary software in medical institutions should be criminalized for many reasons, but that'll never happen.


Thankfully GNU is doing something about this issue with GNU Health, but it seems that few clinics use it.