Most of us aren’t keen on this, but we accept it as an unavoidable part of the modern world, if we even think about it at all. The data collected on us is part of the digital ecosystem in which we live, and most of us accept that it’s an unavoidable part of modern reality.

Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, programming legend and recipient of at least 15 honorary doctorates and professorships, however, doesn’t think so. He has dedicated his professional life to railing against software surveillance, and despite surveillance continuing to increase in prevalence every year, he remains as strong a voice on the subject as ever.

At the end of 2016, Stallman gave a talk at Web Summit where he outlined the case against software surveillance in the modern world. Addressing a crowd heaving with programmers and yet exceptionally short on journalists – I was the only one – he was his eccentric self, standing with only socks on his feet, dramatically overrunning his timeslot and concluding with the auction of a soft toy wildebeest – known also as a gnu – before vanishing into the night with an army of software disciples following in his wake.

Many too easily dismiss Stallman as an irrelevant oddity, but to do so would be to ignore the very serious and compelling points he raises. For while the rest of us accept the growing lack of privacy afforded to us, Stallman sheds light on how utterly strange and wrong we would have found it even a short while ago.

“Privacy is extremely important. When a great hero, Edward Snowden, informed us of how much the government was snooping on our web browsing, the rate of access to certain Wikipedia pages fell by 20%. Pages like Al Qaeda, bombs,” he says. “These people, they were not terrorists but they were afraid that the government would treat them as terrorists if they were seen looking up certain topics in the encyclopaedia. So people are intimidated by the knowledge that they're being watched all the time.”

So often we think of a loss of privacy as unimportant, but Stallman argues it is quite the opposite, striking at the very roots of the democratic world in which we exist.

“It threatens democracy more directly. Democracy means that people control what the state does, but first we have to know what the state does; the state tends to hide its actions, and the only way we find out is through whistleblowers,” he explains. “But the government doesn't want people to find out about its nasty, perhaps criminal behaviours, so the government declares the whistleblower to be a spy and a traitor, and tries to put the hero in prison.

“If the government can identify the whistleblower, it’s too dangerous for the whistleblower. If we want to find out what the state is doing so that we the people can have control over it, we need to make whistleblowers safe. But if the government can tell who goes where and who talks to who, there's no way for the journalist's source, the whistleblower, to talk with the journalist and have the government not know.

“So we must reduce the level of data collection of our people down to point where the state can't tell who's talking with journalists. Any system of data collection that enables the state to find out who talked with that journalist is a deadline threat to democracy. And no matter what supposed secondary service this data collection serves, we can't, we don't dare, permit it to continue.”