Fedora Workstation 40 Considering To Implement Privacy-Preserving Telemetry

[Quackdoc]

" 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?

its actually not hard to setup a privacy preserving telemetry. the issue is making it open enough so users can actually figure out what is being collected. a good example is crashpad crash reporting, that can be considered privacy preserving telemetry

[messcolon]

The proposal is clear about it being opt-out:

[...] 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.

Not gonna argue against limited telemetry, but when users - despite being transparently and kindly asked - decide against opting in, maybe you should just respect that as a given …

[Waethorn]

Telemetry doesn't work. This is just the automation stack for focus groups. What happens when you automate it? Your project loses focus.

You can't rule by committee. You certainly can't rule by the unwashed masses. Look at what happened to Windows since Microsoft laid off 18,000 paid, educated QA testers (that know how to properly diagnose and write bug reports) just before Windows 10 launched, and instead relegated that role to the public that signed up to be beta testers for the Insider program. What gets all the upvotes in the Feedback forums? "These icons aren't pretty enough" and "I need more liberal agenda representation in my software". This is the problem with software development these days.

[Anux]

Not gonna argue against limited telemetry, but when users - despite being transparently and kindly asked - decide against opting in, maybe you should just respect that as a given …

Yes, that always leaves a feeling of shadiness. I'm used to those practices from our government but an open source project should have a little more morale then corrupt politicians. These tactics drove me away from Ubuntu.

[cynic]

screw them!

I've been a Fedora user since Core 6, but after all the RH BS and now this telemetry thing I'll move back to Debian.

[jochendemuth]

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.

I adjust a couple of settings for every Fedora install. Once. Without these changes the OS is barely usable. E.g. the OS suspends after a couple of idle minutes - not a bad default for a desktop environment, but most of my installs run unattended. Since F38 they have removed the stupid item in settings to turn the behavior off.

All the telemetry they'll collect won't show my frustration as I make low-level changes that turn off suspend capabilities alltogether.

IMHO all telemetry is just a means to collect data for the purpose of being abused. Don't do it.

This may be drop in the bucket that makes me switch away from RedHat as IBM works hard to make it irrelevant to me.

[Quackdoc]

The proposal is clear about it being opt-out:


Not gonna argue against limited telemetry, but when users - despite being transparently and kindly asked - decide against opting in, maybe you should just respect that as a given …

and there is a specific reason for this that these people maybe don't understand. it's called respecting the users choice, Opt-out telemery when it has been made clear that opt-in, even when blatanly obvious it exists, doesn't work, is simply trying to trick people into it, and is incredibly scummy. if they do go through with this, fedora will be, shamefully, blacklisted from all of my PCs and testing, as well as refusing to recommend them, I realize im a small sample size and I wont impact much, but at least I can help my friends avoid it.

really starting to run low on distros to recommend now.

[tildearrow]

The proposal is clear about it being opt-out:


Not gonna argue against limited telemetry, but when users - despite being transparently and kindly asked - decide against opting in, maybe you should just respect that as a given …

Opt-out should be illegal. Let me eat fruit without having to receive a dish of junk food and rejecting it before getting fruit.

[tildearrow]

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.

This is very true, but then let me tell you: computers weren't supposed to be easy.

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.

For one thing, the word "telemetry" has negative connotations among us. Why didn't they use a friendlier, tamer word like "survey" (considering many of us accept the Steam one)?

[intelfx]

Long overdue.

I’ve no problem whatsoever with distribution developers collecting privacy-conscious telemetry. Opt-in telemetry does not work by definition, thus it has to be opt-out. If this has the potential to make Fedora better, I’m all hands “for” it.