That's Stallman for you
It's a question of what you define as "bad". There's no doubt that R.S. has a highly paranoid view of the net. The fact is that the world is changing, and we are all finding the concept of cloud services of every type to be highly convenient. We LIKE the idea that local and cloud storage is seamless, so we WANT a search to cover everything. R.S. still wants different buttons for "search my device" and "search the net", but the increasing proportion of non-technical users just don't want that fuss, many barely even understand it.
By subscribing to Google, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, etc. in the first place, we are constantly letting these services know what we like, search for, etc. anyway. Only by not using these services at all (maybe R.S. doesn't?) can you be genuinely private.
Truly malicious software is a genuine problem, but I think it's actually mischievous to suggest that a feature that links local and global searches is "spyware". Unless we all want to live in private bubbles, we need a clearer definition of what constitutes real malware, and what constitutes a net-connected convenience.
