Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry [LWN.net]

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 7, 2023 8:46 UTC (Fri) by eharris (guest, #144549)
Parent article: Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Given the purpose of the proposed data collection ("how its software is used"), why is the collected data not made anonymous? So....no machine specific data (MAC for example)...no network specific data (IP for example)....no user specific data (user details for paid-for licences for example)....and so on. It's all very well to talk the talk about "privacy"........when anonymity is really what is required.

And another thing.....if the "data upload" was truly anonymous, would that not be useful in persuading users (and law makers) about the propriety of the proposal? And finally, does the "data upload" have a stated lifetime.....or does the Fedora-stored data last forever?

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Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 7, 2023 9:45 UTC (Fri) by james (guest, #1325) [Link] (1 responses)

They cover that in the proposal:

We must also not collect any data that could become personally-identifiable if combined with other data, which notably means IP addresses must not be stored.

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 7, 2023 11:26 UTC (Fri) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

Also:
> We only want to collect anonymous data anyway, but we need to be especially mindful of the possibility that combining two "anonymous" data points could result in the data no longer being anonymous.

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 7, 2023 10:48 UTC (Fri) by wjt (subscriber, #56250) [Link]

The proposed data collection is indeed anonymous and does not include any of the data points you mention. The metrics system goes beyond this and is designed to make it impossible to tell whether two separate data points stored on the server came from the same computer or not.

Data lifetime is a great question. Right now there is no automatic retention policy (though the server admin can of course manually remove older data). This would be a great area to improve.