10 ms·

Fedora considers “privacy-preserving” telemetry

135 points by pabs3 3y ago

schmorptron 3y ago
I think in principle this is a good idea, getting actual usage patterns not just from a loud minority seems very useful to the people making the OS. As long as they don't collect egregious stuff I'm very okay with this.
justinclift 3y ago
Reading some of the Fedora discussion thread about this, the attitude of Fedora developers is breathtaking: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-privacy-preserving-telemetry-for-fedora-workstation-system-wide/85320/196 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-pr... Opt-in telemetry is garbage. I’m going to stop responding to comments that are requesting opt-in because I’ve made my position clear: users who opt-in are not a representative sample, and that opt-in data will not be accurate or useful. Accurately summarised to "Fuck off dickheads, your privacy is getting in the way of us doing development!".
musicale 3y ago
Sounds like Red Hat is on a roll. Telemetry isn't enough if they really want to imitate Windows 11. They need to add advertisements as well. And more preinstalled crapware. And consider requiring (or at least strongly recommending) paid cloud-based login for all accounts.
pipo234 3y ago
> I wish they didn't use the name "telemetry" for this; it's going to produce a lot of instinctive reactions from people that don't lend themselves to a productive conversation.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  It's a perfectly accurate description of what they're proposing. Even if they called something else people would immediately recognise it for what it is (and then be even more upset due to weasle-wording)
justinclift 3y ago
The actual proposal: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/CAJqbrbeOZrHvYjvMCc=qGZD_VXBs3-qReeirr+F8t01Eq1sYhw@mail.gmail.com/ https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/CAJqbrbeOZrHvYjvMCc=qGZD_VXB... === What data might we collect? === We are not proposing to collect any [...] particular metrics just yet, because a process for Fedora community approval of metrics to be collected does not yet exist. That said, in the interests of maximum transparency, we wish to give you an idea of what sorts of metrics we might propose to collect in the future. One of the main goals of metrics collection is to analyze whether Red Hat is achieving its goal to make Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development. Accordingly, we want to know things like which IDEs are most popular among our users, and which runtimes are used to create containers using Toolbx. Metrics can also be used to inform user interface design decisions. For example, we want to collect the clickthrough rate of the recommended software banners in GNOME Software to assess which banners are actually useful to users. We also want to know how frequently panels in gnome-control-center are visited to determine which panels could be consolidated or removed, because there are other settings we want to add, but our usability research indicates that the current high quantity of settings panels already makes it difficult for users to find commonly-used settings. Metrics can help us understand the hardware we should be optimizing Fedora for. For example, our boot performance on hard drives dropped drastically when systemd-readahead was removed. Ubuntu has maintained its own readahead implementation, but Fedora does not because we assume that not many users use Fedora on hard drives. It would be nice to collect a metric that indicates whether primary storage is a solid state drive or a hard disk, so we can see actual hard drive usage instead of guessing. We would also want to collect hardware information that would be useful for collaboration with hardware vendors (such as Lenovo), such as laptop model ID. Other Fedora teams may have other metrics they wish to collect. For example, Fedora localization wishes to count users of particular locales to evaluate which locales are in poorer shape relative to their usage. This is only a small sample of what we might want to know; no doubt other community members can think of many more interesting data points to collect. That last piece "no doubt other community members can think of many more interesting data points to collect" sounds pretty bad for telemetry that's enabled by default, with people having to opt out of it. :(
kleinsch 3y ago
Would make more sense to link to the actual proposal rather than a two sentence summary https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-privacy-preserving-telemetry-for-fedora-workstation-system-wide/85320 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-pr...
- Aachen 3y ago
  Nobody is reading even the summary anyway. They saw the word telemetry in the headline and had an opinion.
- counternotions 3y ago
  > One of the main goals of metrics collection is to analyze whether Red Hat is achieving its goal to make Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development. Accordingly, we want to know things like which IDEs are most popular among our users, and which runtimes are used to create containers using Toolbx.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    How is that any of their business? Usually there is a lot more misdirection in what potential benefits telemetry will yield. Not, “We would really like to know what software is running in their machine, there is probably something we can do with it”
    - CameronNemo 3y ago
      Also have they thought of just... Asking their users which IDE they use?
seri4l 3y ago
Instead of collecting more data why don't do something with the data we already have? A quick look at the Fedora Bugzilla or the GNOME GitLab issues tab suggests the bottleneck doesn't lie in data collection, but in processing.
- akikoo 3y ago
  > the bottleneck doesn't lie in data collection, but in processing I created a bug report [1] for tigervnc-server in Fedora because the Fedora documentation [2] for setting up a VNC server didn't match any more what was coming from dnf. In the bug report I provided the info that would need to be fixed in the documentation. Now after two months, seemingly nothing has been done to fix the situation. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2193384 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2193384 [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-administrators-guide/infrastructure-services/TigerVNC/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-ad...
- nixpulvis 3y ago
  Because management can impose these new data collection policies more easily than fixing known issues. It then gives them the potential to find new easier work to have the engineers implement thus making it seem like they are being effective. Meanwhile, it can be unclear how these metrics relate to overall software quality. Some metrics like startup time and crash counts lead to clear improvement, while others like pointer heatmaps and even more invasive focus tracking are highly dubious in my opinion. On a related note, I’m coming to the opinion that A/B testing is harder to pull off than many think. And serving a single user both A and B at any point can confuse them and get in the way of their trusting the consistency of the software. Much like how when you search for something twice and get different results in Apple Maps. OK, now I’m just ranting…
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  Because they will claim that bugzilla is only used by "advanced users" that are not representative of the average user of Fedora. I absolutely detest that Catch-22 argument, which some distro (not Fedora) actually tried to use on me in the past.
- 3y ago
dschuetz 3y ago
It does not really matter anymore how bulk usage data collection is called or whether it is "privacy-preserving". Looking at the current developments in AI, I am concerned that AI models can easily de-anonymize and guess end point users when being fed with "telemetry data" of hundreds of thousands clients. I hear a lot and read a lot of software and hardware vendors saying that "telemetry" is supposed to somehow magically improve the user experience in the long run, but in actuality software tends to get worse, unstable and less useful. So, I would like to know how exactly any telemetry data from Fedora Linux clients is going to help them, or how is it going to improve anything.
- musicale 3y ago
  > So, I would like to know how exactly any telemetry data from Fedora Linux clients is going to help them, or how is it going to improve anything. It won't improve anything for users. It might improve something for IBM.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  You really don't need AI to do this. Collect enough data points and you can fingerprint basically anyone using very old fashioned techniques. AI doesn't really bring anything new to the table.
  - dschuetz 3y ago
    AI would need far less data points to achieve an acceptable result, and maybe even be able of fingerpointing, not just fingerprinting. Just wait and see how the data broker bros start selling AI assisted data mining for ads. Big tech is doing that already. It's mind boggling how everyone seems to be just OK with that.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    What AI can sometimes add is automatic feature extraction. Rather than having a to have a human explicitly think "I bet we can identify people via $x" and writing bespoke code to do it. E.g. this has been the big deal with AI in medical diagnostics, that it can look at the same data a very skilled human doctor sees, and still manage to discover something that the human couldn't, due to unnoticed features
lakomen 3y ago
IBM strikes again. The recent closing of build files of RHEL, now telemetry in Fedora. At least it doesn't have ads like Ubuntu amirite... Spyware everywhere. Not that I'd ever use Fedora as my main Desktop OS. Arch has won that battle. And if I want a simple installer, where everything just works, Manjaro.
- rwmj 3y ago
  It's so tedious every time people ascribe some action of Fedora or Red Hat to IBM. This is nothing to do with IBM. Red Hat can and does make these decisions all by itself.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    But these things happened after IBM acquired Red Hat and IBM certainly has the power to instruct Red Hat to steer clear from any actions that might turn the FOSS community against them.
    - MoreQARespect 3y ago
      It's so tedious seeing how many people don't get this. Enshittification following a buyout is practically a rite of passage.
    - rwmj 3y ago
      I work at Red Hat and interact daily with the people making the decisions and it has nothing to do with IBM! In fact they run Red Hat (surprisingly) hands-off. And this particular proposal comes from GNOME who have been making terrible decisions long before IBM acquired Red Hat.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Then maybe IBM should get involved, but in a positive way to let it be known that they risk brand and image damage from these stupid moves and kindly ask for them to stop.
oriettaxx 3y ago
does anybody know what is the domain they use to send the data to? is it: fedoraproject.org ?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I'm not sure but it can be changed to anything the user wants: > all of the components of the server (discussed below) are open source, and we will provide instructions for how to run a simple server yourself and view its metrics database. You can redirect metrics from Fedora’s server to your own by changing a URL in a configuration file. I'm fine with these changes as long as they are transparent.
  - oriettaxx 3y ago
    Ah, I did not read it before, thank you for it. So, to me, as long as they use a specific and dedicated (and known) fqdn, I may just block the whole telemetry adding that entry in /etc/hosts file), can't I?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      And you need to remember to do that every time, on every host that runs Fedora. In practice, after a while you'll stop doing that. That's the beauty of opt-out, eventually nobody opts out any more.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
        And if it's opt-in it becomes essentially useless.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        Indeed, so the sane choice is then not to do it in the first place. Respect for your users and all that...
        3y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> We believe an open source community can ethically collect limited aggregate data on how its software is used For me the big question is why? Proprietary software needs telemetry because the user is not in control and features are only added by the owner of the software, thus the centralized owner needs to know what features to add. Open source is different. It is decentralized. Anybody can tweak the system to make it better for themselves. In addition, as opposed to proprietary software which sells licenses, the most common open source monetary model seems to be selling support in which case the people buying support can ask for the feature without telemetry. To put it another way, you need telemetry for a cathedral since decisions are made centrally. A bazaar doesn’t need telemetry, since decisions are decentralized.
- wprl 3y ago
  You may have answered your own question. Perhaps centralization is the point as we move closer to the “extinguish” phase of open source as we have known it.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > We believe an open source community can ethically collect limited aggregate data on how its software is used And then they proceed to list a bunch of non-ethical and extremely specific data.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >Anybody can tweak the system to make it better for themselves. 99% of users just use whatever the default packages their ON gives them. Practically none of them are digging into the code and making changes. >as opposed to proprietary software which sells licenses, the most common open source monetary model seems to be selling support in which case the people buying support can ask for the feature without telemetry. Proprietary software which are sold are in the business of creating products with enough value that people are willing to pay actual money for them. It is smart to look at what these businesses are doing because they are incentivized to make good software so they get to be efficicient about doing so. Meanwhile most open source programs are given out for free and do not care about user experience or providing features for the mass audience. Asking for features publically is just one, biased signal. There is more to telemetry like seeing what features are actually used. What investments should be double downed on. What features should be made more clear how to use. What crashes are the worst. What parts of your program need to be optimized. etc.
jacquesm 3y ago
WTF is wrong with these companies? Don't they understand that the only reason they are in business is because they do not do such things?
- jrflowers 3y ago
  “Not doing telemetry” is not even remotely tangential to “why is IBM in business”
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    This makes no sense. To elaborate: It's obvious that my comment referred to RedHat. IBM owns RedHat and I'm sure they can influence this sort of thing but they should realize that RedHat is where it is because it is a company that in the past could be relied upon not to do such stupid things. Telemetry doesn't serve the users, and the kind of users that are customers of RedHat will certainly not appreciate this sort of bait-and-switch and may well leave for other platforms. IBM won't lose any business on account of this but they're burning up value that they paid good money for when they acquired RedHat.
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      Ceci ne pas une IBM-owned-project Edit: This was a response to the earlier version of your post that only said “This makes no sense”.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Fedora has a very close relationship with RedHat, far more so than other community projects and RedHat is in turn owned by IBM. To all intents and purposes the Fedora community is on a leash. Many of the Fedora maintainers are RedHat employees. There are financial and infrastructure ties as well.
        jrflowers 3y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images My post was not an IBM-owned-project but it evoked the idea of one inside the reader, much like Magritte
0xbadc0de5 3y ago
As someone who's used Fedora for 20 years (since before it existed, ie: RH6), this decision would be a show stopper. No, Fedora, you're doing just fine without telemetry! If you try to force it, you'll lose a ton of loyal users. Find out whoever is pushing this idiocy and fire them, quick.
- registeredcorn 3y ago
  Any suggestions for an alternative to switch to?
  - maxk42 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm about to jump ship too. They're decisionmaking has been poor for the past couple of years.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    Maybe Debian testing? Although I dont think this is a big of deal as sending the data is still opt-in, it collects the data by default but doesn't send it.
    - pabs3 3y ago
      Debian has opt-in minimal telemetry; popularity-contest, submits installed packages and when they were used (approximately). It also has lots of other privacy issues inherited from upstream open source projects. https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
W4RH4WK55 3y ago
Do we have any indication that telemetry leads to an actually improvent of the software's overall quality at this point? It seems to me that even with excessive levels of telemetry, software remains buggy and sluggish most of the time.
- romanovcode 3y ago
  To add to the point: Alphabet has probably most data than any other company (except FB I suppose) and they still can't release a good product that people will actually use no matter how much data they have.
  - dschuetz 3y ago
    There's this anecdote (which might have been made up entirely to make a point): Restaurant management wanted to compare different soup offerings by counting orders from each soup to determine which ones were more popular. They have selected the most popular two offerings, the rest were scrapped in order to safe money on ingredients. Soon after, not only did the order numbers of those two soup offerings drop, the total number of soup orders dropped. How come? Well, maybe nobody has asked the customers if the offered soup was tasty at all. A quick survey revealed that customers make the popular choice, find out it's crap, and then do not ever order soup again in that restaurant, or in rarer cases give the other one a shot. It turned out, the most popular offer was basically cheap crap nobody wanted to eat, and when there's nothing else, they keep ordering the same, or never visit that restaurant again. Telemetry does not tell anything about user preferences. Who ever is selling you that idea, does not either.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Alphabet markets two linux-based operating systems for consumer devices that are extremely popular. Telemetry from the field makes android and chromeos better operating systems.
    - jmholla 3y ago
      I don't think the fact that Google has two popular OSes with telemetry means that telemetry makes them better OSes. For Android, their only real competitor is iOS. Their big advantage there is cost and the reason there isn't really another competitor is the difficulty of creating an OS which requires a number of resources. For ChromeOS, the situation is similar with regards to the time to create an OS. I think there, their main competitors are small Linux distributions, but, in addition to manpower, Google has the money to procure and sell laptops with their software already on them at scale. So, I'm not convinced telemetry is actually creating a better product, their products happen to have telemetry.
gnu8 3y ago
It's open source so I'm just going modify the telemetry program to send nonsense and publish my changes on shithub so anyone else who wants to monkey wrench Fedora's telemetry can do so (even if they don't actually run Fedora).
- teddyh 3y ago
  This solves the problem only for you, and those users who are aware of the problem, have enough understanding to know that it is a problem, and also have the technical know-how to even use your published code. How many percent of the user base does this cover? Are you OK with implicitly recommending Red Hat/Fedora (by using it) when you know that most people will get caught by this?
  - ndiddy 3y ago
    That's assuming that gnu8's telemetry spoofing program only generates one machine's worth of spoofed telemetry data. If he thinks bigger than that (generate data from thousands of fake machines, launder the traffic through residential IP proxies, etc), he could be the source of the majority of the Fedora telemetry data. That would give him the ability to make Red Hat engineers do his bidding, which seems like a fun power to have.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  So you'll sabotage observability for everyone else because you don't want to just opt out?
- howinteresting 3y ago
  I hope shameless bad actors like you never use the software I write.
  - gnu8 3y ago
    If you don’t add telemetry to your software then you won’t have a problem.
paxys 3y ago
Exactly what you would expect from an IBM sponsored project.
tokai 3y ago
Annoying, I have used Fedora for many years now and I hadn't planned to stop that. Even with the slim chance that they don't go through with this, it tells that they have lost their bearings. Oh well it will be nostalgic doing a bit of distro hopping again.
- doodlesdev 3y ago
  Where are you planning to distro hop to? I find Fedora has a special balance between bleeding edge and stable that no other distribution I tried achieves.
  - tokai 3y ago
    Thats a really good question. Guess I'll check out opensuse tumbleweed.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      That's what I was going to suggest; the SUSE people do good work. If Fedora becomes something I want to leave... that's where I'm going. I don't really need or want this pressure on Fedora -- 'the premiere desktop... blah, barf'. This is how we got Canonical and their brazen licensing I'm happy enough with it basically being RHEL-next. Package the misc things (GNOME, KDE, Sway, etc) with the appropriate SELinux policies and bam, a decent desktop OS.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        One minor quality-of-life suggestion that I found with SUSE, is after you install things make a soft link from their "zypper" package manager utility to "zyp". That way, you can just type "zyp ..." for stuff which is pretty easy, whereas "zypper" I always found to be more of a pain (for typing). "zypper" seems to attract typos, for me anyway. ;) You could do the same thing with an alias too I guess... :)
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Same boat. Been looking at Arch, or back to the Greater Debian Hegemony, probably Pop_OS. I have a System76 laptop I use mostly for travel / edge cases and Pop_OS is decent enough that I'd consider it on the desktop.
edgineer 3y ago
Sneedora in 3... 2... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27742305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27742305
varunk8685 3y ago
[flagged]
bogwog 3y ago
I find it hard not to be cynical about this after everything IBM has been doing. I wonder if this is an attempt to identify exactly which organizations are using Fedora in order to upsell or do another CentOS-like rug pull? Luckily, OpenSuse Tumbleweed looks to be a pretty good alternative to Fedora. There’s even an immutable version of it, like Silverblue!
jacquesm 3y ago
Interesting, it seems as if this has been flagged from the homepage, I'll be sure to contact the moderators to check if this was done by RH employees.
gavinhoward 3y ago
I was going to install Fedora on one of my machines soon. Not anymore.
ilc 3y ago
Ex Red-Hat: I think the Red Hat eco-system is turning IBM Blue. I'll take this as the warning to move off Fedora, to more forward looking distributions. Red Hat already lost my work laptop.... now it'll lose my personal one :(
dschuetz 3y ago
Reading this: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/telemetry-should-you-allow.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/telemetry-should-you-all... I've stumbled on this: > Optional telemetry, of course, but again - this creates a selective and unpredictable reality. Ordinary people don't care either way, and nerds will always make deliberate choices that often have nothing to do with product or profit or anything else entirely. So, by that logic, users who opt out of telemetry are aware of why they are doing it. People who don't care share their chaotic usage patterns. This creates a false picture of usage reality, and makes software worse. In conclusion, there are only two remaining choices: 1. Make telemetry non-optional 2. Ditch telemetry and rely on QA studies
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > 1. Make telemetry non-optional But then users who care about this issue will just block the application's ability to phone home, or use a different one that doesn't spy (my definition of spying is any time data about me or my machines is collected without my informed consent).
  - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
    You just need to make the application complex enough that phoning home is convenient and nice-to-have functionality is deeply intertwined with tracking. Like what Google Chrome does.
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      Interesting, any more details on this? (And have people worked around that?)
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > So, by that logic, users who opt out of telemetry are aware of why they are doing it. Ambiguous: they're aware of why who is doing it? I opt out of telemetry because I don't know why they're doing it - the data collectors. I mean, I know why they say they're doing it, but I don't know if it's true. I also don't want my computing resources and network bandwidth used to further a goal that I might not support. Even if the only reason for collecting data really is to "improve the product", perhaps that'll result in them making the product dependent on systemd, which from my POV would be an adverse outcome.
stainablesteel 3y ago
its not personally identifiable.... yet, but in the future someone will figure out a way to do it not my os, not my problem
ranger207 3y ago
The detailed proposal is pretty comprehensive. I'm confident that if Fedora does go through with this then it will be well designed. A few years ago Ars Technica had a site redesign. When it first came out, it didn't have a dark mode, and the comments on the article announcing the change (after the design had been rolled out) were full of people who were upset with the lack of dark mode. Turns out, many of the subscribers and power users that used dark mode had adblock and the like that blocked metrics collection, leading the Ars web designers with the impression that basically nobody used it. Since then I've opted in to telemetry in programs I trust to be good stewards of that data so that I can at least do a little to ensure that whatever weird setup I might be using, like dark mode, is seen as relevant to the project. But that does bring up the point that just relying on telemetry doesn't always present an accurate picture of what's going on with all of your users. Probably the best way to see what your users are doing would be a combination of telemetry (to see what the average user is doing), surveys (to see what the enthusiastic user who self-selects into completing the survey is doing), and user studies (for specific design decisions). I'd like to see what Fedora's policy for data collection in the last two categories is and if they'll integrate all of it together for more comprehensive decisions. Also, I'm not surprised by the instinctive reactions that people have to the word "telemetry" in the headline, but the proposal is really well done. It addresses many of the complaints I see in these comments, like if it should be opt-in or opt-out, if it's legal under GDPR ("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."), and the like. I think that this proposal was done by a person or team that genuinely sat down and thought through what a real privacy preserving telemetry implementation would look like, rather than the typical corporate claim "it's totally privacy preserving (also our product is not available in the EU)!!!"
egberts1 3y ago
Consider? Just do it.
wooque 3y ago
I don't think users of Fedora NSA/Linux would mind it
- mattdm 3y ago
  LOL wow that's an old-school deep cut!
TrueDuality 3y ago
I see people complaining about instinctive reactions about the usage of the word telemetry, but they're rightly justified in those reactions. People have those instinctive reactions for a very good reason even with this specific proposal. If you read the discussion post, the following becomes clear: * The proposer has clearly not done any research on how to actually collect anonymous data (they'd never heard of differential privacy for example). * They want a plug and play solution (they specifically say they don't want to do more work than that) * They are not open to discussing privacy regulations such as GDPR * They are not willing to bend on the most contentious points of their proposal * The system they want to use collects invasive metrics that can be de-anonymized and has only been used by a niche distribution Because the de-anonymization bit might not be clear, let me summarize some of the things that the Endless OS metrics collect: * Country * Location based on IP address to within 1 degree lat/long * Your specific hardware profile * Daily report that includes your hardware profile, along with the number of times the check ins have occurred in the past * Detailed program usage (every start / stop) * An unspecified series of additional metrics that can be sent from anywhere else on the system via a dbus interface Additional this proposal wants to explicitly collect: * What packages and versions of such are installed * Specific application usage metrics (the example they give is the gnome settings panel) They discard the IP address, but how hard do you think it is to differentiate users based on the combination of hardware profile, +/- 1 degree of location accuracy, their specific set of packages (and knowing the history of package installs/uninstalls already through their package manager). The proposal doesn't meet its stated intentions of being anonymous, and the proposer actively understands that users don't want this but believe their desire for the metrics overrides the end users desire of not being tracked.
motohagiography 3y ago
The approach to this is a half baked idea and an unforced error. If I were contributing to another distro, I would say I was building a general differential privacy and zk-snark library and accompanying services stack that developers could use for what they found interesting. Then once it had some burn in, I'd launch a limited beta where it was trustworthy enough that participants could get useful data from the rest of the clusters without exposing the other participants to risk. Maybe we need a particapatory privacy stack that produces valuable anonymous data and also contributes to it. You might be able to do it with homomorphic arithmetic that increments defined counters (like the hash of a package or version), and we already have distributed ledgers for collecting and distributing the data. We can do queries with differential privacy, and zksnarks. It's not a viable product because people who actually use data want the real data, the discretion is power to them, but as a tool for coordinating a cooperative effort, we need to build something new to say that this is how we do things now.
bravetraveler 3y ago
They need to do more consideration if their answer is to tie it to gnome-initial-setup... unless I misunderstand, and this is purely a GNOME-cooked thing I fear what that means where the preference is saved, and how spins (or users who simply choose to not have GNOME), may feasibly opt out Where's the demarcation? Is this some dconf thing that a timer will read, a service, or what? I lack trust in their handling in certain matters. For example, every Fedora device 'phones home' for AP checks: $ cat /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity-fedora.conf [connectivity] enabled=true uri=http://fedoraproject.org/static/hotspot.txt response=OK interval=300 Including those that are wired... and that's rather unnecessary. I generally get a sense of haste these decisions, lately. To disable it, mask the /usr file with one in /etc: touch /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity-fedora.conf Another example: systemd-oomd on anything with > 64GB installed; entire user scopes randomly killed with oodles free. I say this in the softest way possible, I don't really mind it... but it raises an eyebrow towards eagerness/attention. <snide>They already get to know how well they're doing being "the premier OS" by seeing how often they get hit.</snide>
renewiltord 3y ago
I'm pretty big in favour of removing all telemetry and studies in every way except when they're opt in. Then I'm always going to opt in. I would like the population being optimized for to lean towards me more. Ideally, the only statistics you have are from me and my Sybils, and all of society's energy is dedicated to improving life for me.
gigel82 3y ago
There's no such thing as privacy-preserving telemetry. How do you retrieve the telemetry from the device? Via networking, right? BAM, that's an IP address leak which is PII. We don't need to go any further than that.

135 points by pabs3 3y ago

I think in principle this is a good idea, getting actual usage patterns not just from a loud minority seems very useful to the people making the OS. As long as they don't collect egregious stuff I'm very okay with this.

justinclift 3y ago

Reading some of the Fedora discussion thread about this, the attitude of Fedora developers is breathtaking: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-privacy-preserving-telemetry-for-fedora-workstation-system-wide/85320/196 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-pr... Opt-in telemetry is garbage. I’m going to stop responding to comments that are requesting opt-in because I’ve made my position clear: users who opt-in are not a representative sample, and that opt-in data will not be accurate or useful. Accurately summarised to "Fuck off dickheads, your privacy is getting in the way of us doing development!".

musicale 3y ago

Sounds like Red Hat is on a roll. Telemetry isn't enough if they really want to imitate Windows 11. They need to add advertisements as well. And more preinstalled crapware. And consider requiring (or at least strongly recommending) paid cloud-based login for all accounts.

pipo234 3y ago

> I wish they didn't use the name "telemetry" for this; it's going to produce a lot of instinctive reactions from people that don't lend themselves to a productive conversation.

rcxdude 3y ago
It's a perfectly accurate description of what they're proposing. Even if they called something else people would immediately recognise it for what it is (and then be even more upset due to weasle-wording)

justinclift 3y ago

The actual proposal: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/CAJqbrbeOZrHvYjvMCc=qGZD_VXBs3-qReeirr+F8t01Eq1sYhw@mail.gmail.com/ https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/CAJqbrbeOZrHvYjvMCc=qGZD_VXB... === What data might we collect? === We are not proposing to collect any [...] particular metrics just yet, because a process for Fedora community approval of metrics to be collected does not yet exist. That said, in the interests of maximum transparency, we wish to give you an idea of what sorts of metrics we might propose to collect in the future. One of the main goals of metrics collection is to analyze whether Red Hat is achieving its goal to make Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development. Accordingly, we want to know things like which IDEs are most popular among our users, and which runtimes are used to create containers using Toolbx. Metrics can also be used to inform user interface design decisions. For example, we want to collect the clickthrough rate of the recommended software banners in GNOME Software to assess which banners are actually useful to users. We also want to know how frequently panels in gnome-control-center are visited to determine which panels could be consolidated or removed, because there are other settings we want to add, but our usability research indicates that the current high quantity of settings panels already makes it difficult for users to find commonly-used settings. Metrics can help us understand the hardware we should be optimizing Fedora for. For example, our boot performance on hard drives dropped drastically when systemd-readahead was removed. Ubuntu has maintained its own readahead implementation, but Fedora does not because we assume that not many users use Fedora on hard drives. It would be nice to collect a metric that indicates whether primary storage is a solid state drive or a hard disk, so we can see actual hard drive usage instead of guessing. We would also want to collect hardware information that would be useful for collaboration with hardware vendors (such as Lenovo), such as laptop model ID. Other Fedora teams may have other metrics they wish to collect. For example, Fedora localization wishes to count users of particular locales to evaluate which locales are in poorer shape relative to their usage. This is only a small sample of what we might want to know; no doubt other community members can think of many more interesting data points to collect. That last piece "no doubt other community members can think of many more interesting data points to collect" sounds pretty bad for telemetry that's enabled by default, with people having to opt out of it. :(

kleinsch 3y ago

Would make more sense to link to the actual proposal rather than a two sentence summary https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-privacy-preserving-telemetry-for-fedora-workstation-system-wide/85320 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-pr...

Aachen 3y ago
Nobody is reading even the summary anyway. They saw the word telemetry in the headline and had an opinion.
counternotions 3y ago
> One of the main goals of metrics collection is to analyze whether Red Hat is achieving its goal to make Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development. Accordingly, we want to know things like which IDEs are most popular among our users, and which runtimes are used to create containers using Toolbx.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  How is that any of their business? Usually there is a lot more misdirection in what potential benefits telemetry will yield. Not, “We would really like to know what software is running in their machine, there is probably something we can do with it”
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    Also have they thought of just... Asking their users which IDE they use?

seri4l 3y ago

Instead of collecting more data why don't do something with the data we already have? A quick look at the Fedora Bugzilla or the GNOME GitLab issues tab suggests the bottleneck doesn't lie in data collection, but in processing.

akikoo 3y ago
> the bottleneck doesn't lie in data collection, but in processing I created a bug report [1] for tigervnc-server in Fedora because the Fedora documentation [2] for setting up a VNC server didn't match any more what was coming from dnf. In the bug report I provided the info that would need to be fixed in the documentation. Now after two months, seemingly nothing has been done to fix the situation. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2193384 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2193384 [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-administrators-guide/infrastructure-services/TigerVNC/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-ad...
nixpulvis 3y ago
Because management can impose these new data collection policies more easily than fixing known issues. It then gives them the potential to find new easier work to have the engineers implement thus making it seem like they are being effective. Meanwhile, it can be unclear how these metrics relate to overall software quality. Some metrics like startup time and crash counts lead to clear improvement, while others like pointer heatmaps and even more invasive focus tracking are highly dubious in my opinion. On a related note, I’m coming to the opinion that A/B testing is harder to pull off than many think. And serving a single user both A and B at any point can confuse them and get in the way of their trusting the consistency of the software. Much like how when you search for something twice and get different results in Apple Maps. OK, now I’m just ranting…
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
Because they will claim that bugzilla is only used by "advanced users" that are not representative of the average user of Fedora. I absolutely detest that Catch-22 argument, which some distro (not Fedora) actually tried to use on me in the past.
3y ago

dschuetz 3y ago

It does not really matter anymore how bulk usage data collection is called or whether it is "privacy-preserving". Looking at the current developments in AI, I am concerned that AI models can easily de-anonymize and guess end point users when being fed with "telemetry data" of hundreds of thousands clients. I hear a lot and read a lot of software and hardware vendors saying that "telemetry" is supposed to somehow magically improve the user experience in the long run, but in actuality software tends to get worse, unstable and less useful. So, I would like to know how exactly any telemetry data from Fedora Linux clients is going to help them, or how is it going to improve anything.

musicale 3y ago
> So, I would like to know how exactly any telemetry data from Fedora Linux clients is going to help them, or how is it going to improve anything. It won't improve anything for users. It might improve something for IBM.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
You really don't need AI to do this. Collect enough data points and you can fingerprint basically anyone using very old fashioned techniques. AI doesn't really bring anything new to the table.
- dschuetz 3y ago
  AI would need far less data points to achieve an acceptable result, and maybe even be able of fingerpointing, not just fingerprinting. Just wait and see how the data broker bros start selling AI assisted data mining for ads. Big tech is doing that already. It's mind boggling how everyone seems to be just OK with that.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  What AI can sometimes add is automatic feature extraction. Rather than having a to have a human explicitly think "I bet we can identify people via $x" and writing bespoke code to do it. E.g. this has been the big deal with AI in medical diagnostics, that it can look at the same data a very skilled human doctor sees, and still manage to discover something that the human couldn't, due to unnoticed features

lakomen 3y ago

IBM strikes again. The recent closing of build files of RHEL, now telemetry in Fedora. At least it doesn't have ads like Ubuntu amirite... Spyware everywhere. Not that I'd ever use Fedora as my main Desktop OS. Arch has won that battle. And if I want a simple installer, where everything just works, Manjaro.

rwmj 3y ago
It's so tedious every time people ascribe some action of Fedora or Red Hat to IBM. This is nothing to do with IBM. Red Hat can and does make these decisions all by itself.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  But these things happened after IBM acquired Red Hat and IBM certainly has the power to instruct Red Hat to steer clear from any actions that might turn the FOSS community against them.
  - MoreQARespect 3y ago
    It's so tedious seeing how many people don't get this. Enshittification following a buyout is practically a rite of passage.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    I work at Red Hat and interact daily with the people making the decisions and it has nothing to do with IBM! In fact they run Red Hat (surprisingly) hands-off. And this particular proposal comes from GNOME who have been making terrible decisions long before IBM acquired Red Hat.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Then maybe IBM should get involved, but in a positive way to let it be known that they risk brand and image damage from these stupid moves and kindly ask for them to stop.

oriettaxx 3y ago

does anybody know what is the domain they use to send the data to? is it: fedoraproject.org ?

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I'm not sure but it can be changed to anything the user wants: > all of the components of the server (discussed below) are open source, and we will provide instructions for how to run a simple server yourself and view its metrics database. You can redirect metrics from Fedora’s server to your own by changing a URL in a configuration file. I'm fine with these changes as long as they are transparent.
- oriettaxx 3y ago
  Ah, I did not read it before, thank you for it. So, to me, as long as they use a specific and dedicated (and known) fqdn, I may just block the whole telemetry adding that entry in /etc/hosts file), can't I?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    And you need to remember to do that every time, on every host that runs Fedora. In practice, after a while you'll stop doing that. That's the beauty of opt-out, eventually nobody opts out any more.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      And if it's opt-in it becomes essentially useless.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Indeed, so the sane choice is then not to do it in the first place. Respect for your users and all that...
        3y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> We believe an open source community can ethically collect limited aggregate data on how its software is used For me the big question is why? Proprietary software needs telemetry because the user is not in control and features are only added by the owner of the software, thus the centralized owner needs to know what features to add. Open source is different. It is decentralized. Anybody can tweak the system to make it better for themselves. In addition, as opposed to proprietary software which sells licenses, the most common open source monetary model seems to be selling support in which case the people buying support can ask for the feature without telemetry. To put it another way, you need telemetry for a cathedral since decisions are made centrally. A bazaar doesn’t need telemetry, since decisions are decentralized.

wprl 3y ago
You may have answered your own question. Perhaps centralization is the point as we move closer to the “extinguish” phase of open source as we have known it.
jacquesm 3y ago
> We believe an open source community can ethically collect limited aggregate data on how its software is used And then they proceed to list a bunch of non-ethical and extremely specific data.
charcircuit 3y ago
>Anybody can tweak the system to make it better for themselves. 99% of users just use whatever the default packages their ON gives them. Practically none of them are digging into the code and making changes. >as opposed to proprietary software which sells licenses, the most common open source monetary model seems to be selling support in which case the people buying support can ask for the feature without telemetry. Proprietary software which are sold are in the business of creating products with enough value that people are willing to pay actual money for them. It is smart to look at what these businesses are doing because they are incentivized to make good software so they get to be efficicient about doing so. Meanwhile most open source programs are given out for free and do not care about user experience or providing features for the mass audience. Asking for features publically is just one, biased signal. There is more to telemetry like seeing what features are actually used. What investments should be double downed on. What features should be made more clear how to use. What crashes are the worst. What parts of your program need to be optimized. etc.

jacquesm 3y ago

WTF is wrong with these companies? Don't they understand that the only reason they are in business is because they do not do such things?

jrflowers 3y ago
“Not doing telemetry” is not even remotely tangential to “why is IBM in business”
- jacquesm 3y ago
  This makes no sense. To elaborate: It's obvious that my comment referred to RedHat. IBM owns RedHat and I'm sure they can influence this sort of thing but they should realize that RedHat is where it is because it is a company that in the past could be relied upon not to do such stupid things. Telemetry doesn't serve the users, and the kind of users that are customers of RedHat will certainly not appreciate this sort of bait-and-switch and may well leave for other platforms. IBM won't lose any business on account of this but they're burning up value that they paid good money for when they acquired RedHat.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    Ceci ne pas une IBM-owned-project Edit: This was a response to the earlier version of your post that only said “This makes no sense”.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Fedora has a very close relationship with RedHat, far more so than other community projects and RedHat is in turn owned by IBM. To all intents and purposes the Fedora community is on a leash. Many of the Fedora maintainers are RedHat employees. There are financial and infrastructure ties as well.
      - jrflowers 3y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images My post was not an IBM-owned-project but it evoked the idea of one inside the reader, much like Magritte

0xbadc0de5 3y ago

As someone who's used Fedora for 20 years (since before it existed, ie: RH6), this decision would be a show stopper. No, Fedora, you're doing just fine without telemetry! If you try to force it, you'll lose a ton of loyal users. Find out whoever is pushing this idiocy and fire them, quick.

registeredcorn 3y ago
Any suggestions for an alternative to switch to?
- maxk42 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm about to jump ship too. They're decisionmaking has been poor for the past couple of years.
- jacooper 3y ago
  Maybe Debian testing? Although I dont think this is a big of deal as sending the data is still opt-in, it collects the data by default but doesn't send it.
  - pabs3 3y ago
    Debian has opt-in minimal telemetry; popularity-contest, submits installed packages and when they were used (approximately). It also has lots of other privacy issues inherited from upstream open source projects. https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues

W4RH4WK55 3y ago

Do we have any indication that telemetry leads to an actually improvent of the software's overall quality at this point? It seems to me that even with excessive levels of telemetry, software remains buggy and sluggish most of the time.

romanovcode 3y ago
To add to the point: Alphabet has probably most data than any other company (except FB I suppose) and they still can't release a good product that people will actually use no matter how much data they have.
- dschuetz 3y ago
  There's this anecdote (which might have been made up entirely to make a point): Restaurant management wanted to compare different soup offerings by counting orders from each soup to determine which ones were more popular. They have selected the most popular two offerings, the rest were scrapped in order to safe money on ingredients. Soon after, not only did the order numbers of those two soup offerings drop, the total number of soup orders dropped. How come? Well, maybe nobody has asked the customers if the offered soup was tasty at all. A quick survey revealed that customers make the popular choice, find out it's crap, and then do not ever order soup again in that restaurant, or in rarer cases give the other one a shot. It turned out, the most popular offer was basically cheap crap nobody wanted to eat, and when there's nothing else, they keep ordering the same, or never visit that restaurant again. Telemetry does not tell anything about user preferences. Who ever is selling you that idea, does not either.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Alphabet markets two linux-based operating systems for consumer devices that are extremely popular. Telemetry from the field makes android and chromeos better operating systems.
  - jmholla 3y ago
    I don't think the fact that Google has two popular OSes with telemetry means that telemetry makes them better OSes. For Android, their only real competitor is iOS. Their big advantage there is cost and the reason there isn't really another competitor is the difficulty of creating an OS which requires a number of resources. For ChromeOS, the situation is similar with regards to the time to create an OS. I think there, their main competitors are small Linux distributions, but, in addition to manpower, Google has the money to procure and sell laptops with their software already on them at scale. So, I'm not convinced telemetry is actually creating a better product, their products happen to have telemetry.

gnu8 3y ago

It's open source so I'm just going modify the telemetry program to send nonsense and publish my changes on shithub so anyone else who wants to monkey wrench Fedora's telemetry can do so (even if they don't actually run Fedora).

teddyh 3y ago
This solves the problem only for you, and those users who are aware of the problem, have enough understanding to know that it is a problem, and also have the technical know-how to even use your published code. How many percent of the user base does this cover? Are you OK with implicitly recommending Red Hat/Fedora (by using it) when you know that most people will get caught by this?
- ndiddy 3y ago
  That's assuming that gnu8's telemetry spoofing program only generates one machine's worth of spoofed telemetry data. If he thinks bigger than that (generate data from thousands of fake machines, launder the traffic through residential IP proxies, etc), he could be the source of the majority of the Fedora telemetry data. That would give him the ability to make Red Hat engineers do his bidding, which seems like a fun power to have.
didntcheck 3y ago
So you'll sabotage observability for everyone else because you don't want to just opt out?
howinteresting 3y ago
I hope shameless bad actors like you never use the software I write.
- gnu8 3y ago
  If you don’t add telemetry to your software then you won’t have a problem.

paxys 3y ago

Exactly what you would expect from an IBM sponsored project.

tokai 3y ago

Annoying, I have used Fedora for many years now and I hadn't planned to stop that. Even with the slim chance that they don't go through with this, it tells that they have lost their bearings. Oh well it will be nostalgic doing a bit of distro hopping again.

doodlesdev 3y ago
Where are you planning to distro hop to? I find Fedora has a special balance between bleeding edge and stable that no other distribution I tried achieves.
- tokai 3y ago
  Thats a really good question. Guess I'll check out opensuse tumbleweed.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    That's what I was going to suggest; the SUSE people do good work. If Fedora becomes something I want to leave... that's where I'm going. I don't really need or want this pressure on Fedora -- 'the premiere desktop... blah, barf'. This is how we got Canonical and their brazen licensing I'm happy enough with it basically being RHEL-next. Package the misc things (GNOME, KDE, Sway, etc) with the appropriate SELinux policies and bam, a decent desktop OS.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      One minor quality-of-life suggestion that I found with SUSE, is after you install things make a soft link from their "zypper" package manager utility to "zyp". That way, you can just type "zyp ..." for stuff which is pretty easy, whereas "zypper" I always found to be more of a pain (for typing). "zypper" seems to attract typos, for me anyway. ;) You could do the same thing with an alias too I guess... :)
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Same boat. Been looking at Arch, or back to the Greater Debian Hegemony, probably Pop_OS. I have a System76 laptop I use mostly for travel / edge cases and Pop_OS is decent enough that I'd consider it on the desktop.

edgineer 3y ago

Sneedora in 3... 2... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27742305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27742305

varunk8685 3y ago

[flagged]

bogwog 3y ago

I find it hard not to be cynical about this after everything IBM has been doing. I wonder if this is an attempt to identify exactly which organizations are using Fedora in order to upsell or do another CentOS-like rug pull? Luckily, OpenSuse Tumbleweed looks to be a pretty good alternative to Fedora. There’s even an immutable version of it, like Silverblue!

jacquesm 3y ago

Interesting, it seems as if this has been flagged from the homepage, I'll be sure to contact the moderators to check if this was done by RH employees.

gavinhoward 3y ago

I was going to install Fedora on one of my machines soon. Not anymore.

ilc 3y ago

Ex Red-Hat: I think the Red Hat eco-system is turning IBM Blue. I'll take this as the warning to move off Fedora, to more forward looking distributions. Red Hat already lost my work laptop.... now it'll lose my personal one :(

dschuetz 3y ago

Reading this: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/telemetry-should-you-allow.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/telemetry-should-you-all... I've stumbled on this: > Optional telemetry, of course, but again - this creates a selective and unpredictable reality. Ordinary people don't care either way, and nerds will always make deliberate choices that often have nothing to do with product or profit or anything else entirely. So, by that logic, users who opt out of telemetry are aware of why they are doing it. People who don't care share their chaotic usage patterns. This creates a false picture of usage reality, and makes software worse. In conclusion, there are only two remaining choices: 1. Make telemetry non-optional 2. Ditch telemetry and rely on QA studies

JohnFen 3y ago
> 1. Make telemetry non-optional But then users who care about this issue will just block the application's ability to phone home, or use a different one that doesn't spy (my definition of spying is any time data about me or my machines is collected without my informed consent).
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
  You just need to make the application complex enough that phoning home is convenient and nice-to-have functionality is deeply intertwined with tracking. Like what Google Chrome does.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    Interesting, any more details on this? (And have people worked around that?)
denton-scratch 3y ago
> So, by that logic, users who opt out of telemetry are aware of why they are doing it. Ambiguous: they're aware of why who is doing it? I opt out of telemetry because I don't know why they're doing it - the data collectors. I mean, I know why they say they're doing it, but I don't know if it's true. I also don't want my computing resources and network bandwidth used to further a goal that I might not support. Even if the only reason for collecting data really is to "improve the product", perhaps that'll result in them making the product dependent on systemd, which from my POV would be an adverse outcome.

stainablesteel 3y ago

its not personally identifiable.... yet, but in the future someone will figure out a way to do it not my os, not my problem

ranger207 3y ago

The detailed proposal is pretty comprehensive. I'm confident that if Fedora does go through with this then it will be well designed. A few years ago Ars Technica had a site redesign. When it first came out, it didn't have a dark mode, and the comments on the article announcing the change (after the design had been rolled out) were full of people who were upset with the lack of dark mode. Turns out, many of the subscribers and power users that used dark mode had adblock and the like that blocked metrics collection, leading the Ars web designers with the impression that basically nobody used it. Since then I've opted in to telemetry in programs I trust to be good stewards of that data so that I can at least do a little to ensure that whatever weird setup I might be using, like dark mode, is seen as relevant to the project. But that does bring up the point that just relying on telemetry doesn't always present an accurate picture of what's going on with all of your users. Probably the best way to see what your users are doing would be a combination of telemetry (to see what the average user is doing), surveys (to see what the enthusiastic user who self-selects into completing the survey is doing), and user studies (for specific design decisions). I'd like to see what Fedora's policy for data collection in the last two categories is and if they'll integrate all of it together for more comprehensive decisions. Also, I'm not surprised by the instinctive reactions that people have to the word "telemetry" in the headline, but the proposal is really well done. It addresses many of the complaints I see in these comments, like if it should be opt-in or opt-out, if it's legal under GDPR ("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."), and the like. I think that this proposal was done by a person or team that genuinely sat down and thought through what a real privacy preserving telemetry implementation would look like, rather than the typical corporate claim "it's totally privacy preserving (also our product is not available in the EU)!!!"

egberts1 3y ago

Consider? Just do it.

wooque 3y ago

I don't think users of Fedora NSA/Linux would mind it

mattdm 3y ago
LOL wow that's an old-school deep cut!

TrueDuality 3y ago

I see people complaining about instinctive reactions about the usage of the word telemetry, but they're rightly justified in those reactions. People have those instinctive reactions for a very good reason even with this specific proposal. If you read the discussion post, the following becomes clear: * The proposer has clearly not done any research on how to actually collect anonymous data (they'd never heard of differential privacy for example). * They want a plug and play solution (they specifically say they don't want to do more work than that) * They are not open to discussing privacy regulations such as GDPR * They are not willing to bend on the most contentious points of their proposal * The system they want to use collects invasive metrics that can be de-anonymized and has only been used by a niche distribution Because the de-anonymization bit might not be clear, let me summarize some of the things that the Endless OS metrics collect: * Country * Location based on IP address to within 1 degree lat/long * Your specific hardware profile * Daily report that includes your hardware profile, along with the number of times the check ins have occurred in the past * Detailed program usage (every start / stop) * An unspecified series of additional metrics that can be sent from anywhere else on the system via a dbus interface Additional this proposal wants to explicitly collect: * What packages and versions of such are installed * Specific application usage metrics (the example they give is the gnome settings panel) They discard the IP address, but how hard do you think it is to differentiate users based on the combination of hardware profile, +/- 1 degree of location accuracy, their specific set of packages (and knowing the history of package installs/uninstalls already through their package manager). The proposal doesn't meet its stated intentions of being anonymous, and the proposer actively understands that users don't want this but believe their desire for the metrics overrides the end users desire of not being tracked.

motohagiography 3y ago

The approach to this is a half baked idea and an unforced error. If I were contributing to another distro, I would say I was building a general differential privacy and zk-snark library and accompanying services stack that developers could use for what they found interesting. Then once it had some burn in, I'd launch a limited beta where it was trustworthy enough that participants could get useful data from the rest of the clusters without exposing the other participants to risk. Maybe we need a particapatory privacy stack that produces valuable anonymous data and also contributes to it. You might be able to do it with homomorphic arithmetic that increments defined counters (like the hash of a package or version), and we already have distributed ledgers for collecting and distributing the data. We can do queries with differential privacy, and zksnarks. It's not a viable product because people who actually use data want the real data, the discretion is power to them, but as a tool for coordinating a cooperative effort, we need to build something new to say that this is how we do things now.

bravetraveler 3y ago

They need to do more consideration if their answer is to tie it to gnome-initial-setup... unless I misunderstand, and this is purely a GNOME-cooked thing I fear what that means where the preference is saved, and how spins (or users who simply choose to not have GNOME), may feasibly opt out Where's the demarcation? Is this some dconf thing that a timer will read, a service, or what? I lack trust in their handling in certain matters. For example, every Fedora device 'phones home' for AP checks: $ cat /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity-fedora.conf [connectivity] enabled=true uri=http://fedoraproject.org/static/hotspot.txt response=OK interval=300 Including those that are wired... and that's rather unnecessary. I generally get a sense of haste these decisions, lately. To disable it, mask the /usr file with one in /etc: touch /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity-fedora.conf Another example: systemd-oomd on anything with > 64GB installed; entire user scopes randomly killed with oodles free. I say this in the softest way possible, I don't really mind it... but it raises an eyebrow towards eagerness/attention. <snide>They already get to know how well they're doing being "the premier OS" by seeing how often they get hit.</snide>

renewiltord 3y ago

I'm pretty big in favour of removing all telemetry and studies in every way except when they're opt in. Then I'm always going to opt in. I would like the population being optimized for to lean towards me more. Ideally, the only statistics you have are from me and my Sybils, and all of society's energy is dedicated to improving life for me.

gigel82 3y ago

There's no such thing as privacy-preserving telemetry. How do you retrieve the telemetry from the device? Via networking, right? BAM, that's an IP address leak which is PII. We don't need to go any further than that.