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

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.