Fedora's telemetry is planned to be OPT-OUT

…fedoraproject.org/…/55H3DT5CCL73HLMQJ6DK63KCAHZW…

However, we also want to ensure that the data we collect is meaningful, so gnome-initial-setup will default to displaying the toggle as enabled,even though the underlying setting will initially be disabled. (The underlying setting will not actually be enabled until the user finishes the privacy page, to ensure users have the opportunity to disable the setting before any data is uploaded.) This is to ensure the system is opt-out, not opt-in. This is essential because we know that opt-in metrics are not very useful. Few users would opt in, and these users would not be representative of Fedora users as a whole. We are not interested in opt-in metrics.

Essentially they’re playing with words to say it’s opt in but if you just click Next like most users will do, it’ll be enabled. The developer openly admits few users would opt in and complains that it wouldn’t be useful.

hexagonwin,

Though I’m curious how does teletry work in a GNU/Linux system? Is there some daemon like ‘telemetryd’ that watches /var/log or something…?

Secret300,

On Endless OS, applications use a D-Bus API (via a small C library, eos-metrics) to record metrics events locally on the device. This API is implemented by a system-wide service, named eos-metrics-event-recorder or eos-event-recorder-daemon (no, I don’t know why it has two different names either), which buffers those events in memory, and periodically submits them anonymously to a server, Azafea, which ingests them into a PostgreSQL database (after a short layover in a Redis queue). If the computer is offline – often the case for Endless OS systems! – events are persisted to a size-limited ring buffer on disk, and submitted when the computer is online.

From …gnome.org/…/endless-oss-privacy-preserving-metri…

Fedora says they intend to deploy endlessOS’s metric system

fhein,

but if you just click Next like most users will do, it’ll be enabled

That’s the definition of opt-out, so they’re telling the truth :) Opt-out is the worse alternative when it comes to unwanted features, opt-in would have been better.

Gecko,
@Gecko@lemmy.world avatar

Opt-out helps you capture the group of users that simply do not care about telemetry.

As someone who recently started developing an open-source GUI application for a few thousand users I cannot stress enough how instrumental telemetry has been in fixing a variety of crashes.

Secret300,

It’s still a proposal if you have more to say about opt-in/opt-out specifically they made a new thread to discuss it here

gobbling871,

That said, Fedora Legal has determined that if we collect any personally-identifiable data, the entire metrics system must be opt-in. Since we are only interested in opt-out metrics due to the low value of opt-in metrics, we must accordingly never collect any personally-identifiable data.

Looks like this statement contradicts with their goal.

joojmachine,

How, exactly? They’ve been saying from the very beginning that they don’t need or want personally-identifiable data.

Vilian,

red hat, what are you doing

hglman,

P R O F I T

Grouchy,

That’s lip service to privacy with spyware in reality.

bbsm3678,

Do you know how this will affect existing installations? Is this gnome only or any desktop?

shreddy_scientist,
@shreddy_scientist@lemmy.ml avatar

States the gnome-initial-setup. KDE is big on telemetry only being opt-in, so it seems like just the gnome environment. Or at least I hope I’m right…

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