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 Techni

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)!!!"