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If the vendor supplied such a system or provided the answer to your question, would you trust it? Why? You always need independent researchers to verify vendor

• vetinari 8y ago
  That's where the transparency comes in. In most linux distribution, when you have a crash and the crash reporting is enabled, you can peek into what exactly is going to be sent. If you have smallest of the doubt, you can opt to not send anything. Or opt out of sending anything, ever. Of course, seeing that the data you submit is used to solve your specific problem, and not disappearing into black hole just to feed some analytics, helps with the motivation to submit. No need to debug the constantly changing code. Even if your researcher verifies, that a specific release sends only such and such data, the next months release can send something else. The verification would take longer than a month, and given the cadence of releases, would be permanently out of date.
  • foo101 8y ago
    If the vendor wrote crash reports which you could review before sending, would you trust that the crash report is actually what is being sent? If you opted out of sending anything, do you really trust that the vendor is not sending anything? You still need to research what is going on at the low level to be sure if something is being sent or not and what is being sent. Your grandma is going to rely on the information obtained from independent researchers. Yes, the behavior of Linux distributions are also independently audited by independent researchers.