Fedora Workstation 40 Considering To Implement Privacy-Preserving Telemetry

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Workstation 40 Considering To Implement Privacy-Preserving Telemetry

If there wasn't enough Red Hat drama happening in recent weeks, the Red Hat Display Systems Team is now considering to implement privacy-preserving telemetry beginning with Fedora Workstation 40...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Considers-Telemetry

[tildearrow]

but our usability research indicates that the current high quantity of settings panels already makes it difficult for users to find commonly-used settings.

That's silly considering KDE has way more settings than GNOME...
I believe that the actual issue here isn't the number of settings, but rather their location (for example, display settings being on Devices).

[Quackdoc]

make it opt-in not opt out and it will be fine

[sophisticles]

I understand their reasoning but for a community that rags on Google and Apple and Microsoft for "spying" on them by collecting telemetry and considering the stink that was caused when it was discovered that Deepin was doing the same thing, I find it hard to believe that this gets approved for implementation much less gets accepted by the majority of end users.

I think that this will have the opposite effect of what they hope it will, it will probably result in a couple of Fedora forks that promise to be bug-for-bug compatible with Fedora but without the spyware.

https://www.fosslinux.com/48103/deepin-linux-safe-spyware.htm

[furtadopires]

I just want to comment here before the 10th page

[tuxd3v]

" Privacy-Preserving Telemetry"

At least they are open about it.. if that is real we will have to jump to a more privacy proof solution..
Because people does want privacy and hates being spied..

How can we put "privacy- preserving" and Telemetry in the same sentence?

[skeevy420]

That's silly considering KDE has way more settings than GNOME...
I believe that the actual issue here isn't the number of settings, but rather their location (for example, display settings being on Devices).

While I gave you the first like and agree with you, still, you'd be surprised how many regular people, non-geeks, get confused by the simplest of things like thinking they have to use that one specific computer to access their Yahoo email or thinking that every search bar does the same thing...like Chrome address bar searching, Alt+F2 on KDE, Start menu searching, random program search bars, etc are all supposed to do a GIS and not the contextual specific searches they actually are.

No amount of telemetry is going to fix stupid. Even the simplest, most dumbed-down interfaces confuse stupid people. I know, I see the confusion, the deer in headlights look, in someone's face practically every time I use a self-checkout.

For the record, I'm not upset about anonymous telemetry. If it helps the actual developers know where to focus their efforts without spying on me I'm all for it. That's why I normally enable some light KDE telemetry.

[avis]

I've no problem with telemetry, the issue is companies almost always misuse it, not in a sense of spying on users but removing powerful rarely used features.

Mozilla (and some other companies I wouldn't want to name) has perfectly demonstrated that. Once Firefox was a very powerful browser, nowadays you can barely distinguish it from Chrome.

I'm almost sure the whole experiment was Gnome developers idea: "How are we going to maim Gnome even further?"

[avis]

" Privacy-Preserving Telemetry"

At least they are open about it.. if that is real we will have to jump to a more privacy proof solution..
Because people does want privacy and hates being spied..

How can we put "privacy- preserving" and Telemetry in the same sentence?

Please do not use Fedora. There are literally hundreds of other distros without this "malware".

It would be great if people stopped talking about privacy here (after all, all the data points and how and where they are collected will be made public) but talked about the use of telemetry for the worse or better.

If you really cared about privacy you would not 1) use the Internet (your web browser, specially if you're under Linux, is easily identifiable even if you always use Private Mode) 2) use your mobile phone (IMEI, location services, cellular operators saving your location, messages and calls) 3) be signed up on these forums (an infinite trail of your messages).

[dlq84]

I'm glad my favorite distro is community maintained.