Fedora Making Progress On New Privacy-Minded System For Counting User Statistics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Making Progress On New Privacy-Minded System For Counting User Statistics

Earlier this month there was a change proposal announced that would give Fedora system's a new unique UUID tracking identifier to count systems. The intention isn't to track users but rather to provide more statistics about the Fedora install base compared to the current system that is just tracking unique IP addresses, but a revised proposal would improve the privacy while still offering up much of the same statistics potential...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Countme-Proposal

[mattdm]

200,000+ unique IP addresses per day, not users. The proposal would still not count users, but at least let us get a better idea of systems.

[mattdm]

FWIW the main downside to this plan is that it isn't 1:1 comparable to openSUSE's UUID based counting (see https://metrics.opensuse.org/). That's not really crucial but it'd be interesting to be actually looking at the same numbers across distros.

[Britoid]

In before someone complains that sending the number 54 is spyware.

[cen1]

I'll force set my to 1337

[Installer]

Counting unique IP addresses can be difficult given the number of roaming devices these days. it’s also really difficult to get a useful number out of it considering things like IPv6 temporary/privacy addresses that changes every day or even more often.

I really hope we’ll see more non-personal data collection too. Something like the package popularity contest system for Fedora would be nice.

[kpedersen]

In before someone complains that sending the number 54 is spyware.

No. Just sloppy sh*tware

If you want that, just run Windows. Much easier.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Fedora is focused on getting au accurate look at the number of installs,

[bash2bash]

Fedora is taking the path of google, looking at various ways of tracking its users.

After F29 was released, strange packages that where optional started to become a requirement. Take a look at the packages "geoclue2" and "iio-sensor-proxy" for example...

Next, they will combine the "New Privacy-Minded System For Counting User Statistics" to use a bit of geo-location via geoclue2 and some sensor data about how you use your system via iio-sensor-proxy and then one day the statistics won't be so privacy-minded after all...

The trick is to do it slowly, so the general masses accept the changes without complaints.

Like adding the packages in F29, set them to start by default but disable requests then somewhere in F30 make them respond to some requests by default...

Maybe some ex-google employees transferred to RedHat ? haha