While I agree that proprietary software isn't necessarily immoral, I take objection with your premise. The software used for collecting and selling user data i

While I agree that proprietary software isn't necessarily immoral, I take objection with your premise. The software used for collecting and selling user data is proprietary, all of it. This is because: 1. if it were developed as open source, in the open, people could inspect what it does 2. profiling user data is most often a company's core competency, the trade secret that they won't give away If not, then please point out to free software packages I can use to collect and profile user data, because I have a business idea I'd like to try and no resources for software development. Oh, do you mean those companies run their proprietary stuff on top of Linux? Well, if not Linux, it would have been Solaris, or Windows. The higher cost wouldn't have been much of a deterrence, in capitalism due to competition the cost does eventually come down.