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

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 7, 2023 18:52 UTC (Fri) by gnoutchd (guest, #121472)
In reply to: Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry by geofft
Parent article: Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

[...] it's going to produce a lot of instinctive reactions from people that don't lend themselves to a productive conversation. (See, for instance, the person objecting that Linux users culturally value their privacy, on a public and archived-forever mailing list, signed with their full name and long-term-persistent email address.)

Putting an opinion on a public record under my real name does not imply I'm OK with surveillance in the (many!) other aspects of my life. I don't want to be told that my privacy concerns will be dismissed and denigrated unless I conspicuously employ every possible defense.

It's true that FOSS projects are very public, perhaps excessively so at times. Given our issues around diversity and inclusion, perhaps we could take contributor privacy more seriously. But the radical transparency of FOSS projects is exactly what makes the software trustworthy and therefore attractive to users worried about privacy. I was drawn to FOSS in great part because I intensely care about my privacy, and I want tools that I can trust.

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Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 7, 2023 18:58 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

One of the problems I see with this is that there's considerable overlap between the folks objecting to telemetry (of any sort) and those that complain that projects are not listening [1] to their users. They simultaneously decry decisions being made without supporting data, and object to attempts to obtain said data.

[1] What comes to mind is ALSA support in Firefox, and extension use in GNOME (and Firefox)

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 11, 2023 7:37 UTC (Tue) by kilobyte (subscriber, #108024) [Link] (3 responses)

Trying to ransom our data is bad regardless of what excuse you say.

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 13, 2023 23:03 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Trying to ransom our data is bad regardless of what excuse you say.

Who, exactly, is "Trying to ransom our data"? And for what? Those are some pretty strong words....

The thing is, it doesn't matter I or you say here -- What matters is what's in the actual proposal -- the proposal that hardly anyone seems to have actually *read* before expressing opinions about what it says and the "obvious" motivations of its authors and/or the entities that are paying their salaries.

So, going back to what the actual proposal says, no data will be submitted without explicit user consent.

Meanwhile. If you have a problem with "data being gathered" on your local system, I trust you've also disabled (eg) GNOME's search/indexing functionality, which is on by default [1]. Do you also routinely clear (or disable) your browser cache? And then there's everything gathered and stored in ~/.cache or /var/cache -- The system I'm typing this on has over 2.7GB of stuff in ~/.cache (1.2GB of that are browser caches), plus another ~6GB of stuff in /var/cache covering 125 different programs, and while some of that is generic (eg dnf metadata caches) I'd wager the majority of it is stuff unique to my system or even me personally. I actually opted into very little of that, except in the sense that I willingly chose to use a modern Linux desktop system.

[1] Putting aside GNOME, there's also the classic 'locate' database, though I'm not sure if that's installed/enabled by default on Fedora these days. Personally I've always installed/enabled it as I find that functionality invaluable.

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 14, 2023 8:56 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And there's KDE's baloo, which I don't understand. On my current system I can't be bothered to disable it, but on a previous system it (or its predecessor) basically screwed up loads of systems. It extended the login time on my Athlon Thunderbird system to over 36 hours (dunno how long it was - I killed it), which is pretty disastrous on a desktop that gets shut down every night.

It was on by default "to improve your experience with KMail and the like" (which I don't use), so that was a big chunk of the KDE4 disaster ...

Cheers,
Wol

Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

Posted Jul 14, 2023 11:25 UTC (Fri) by zuki (subscriber, #41808) [Link]

> there's also the classic 'locate' database, though I'm not sure if that's installed/enabled by default on Fedora these days. Personally I've always installed/enabled it as I find that functionality invaluable.

It is. Currently using plocate: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Plocate_as_the_def.... You're welcome ;)