Approaches to data handling, safety, and avoiding individual identification — a breakout topic for the F40 Change Request on Privacy-preserving telemetry for Fedora Workstation

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@pavi

Whoever ends up having to review what data will be collected will need some expertise with assessing questions like this (differential privacy, how to do re-identification, what could be PII, etc.). I don’t really have it. Does FESCO have such expertise, I guess not since it is voted in? So it sounds like it would be best if the deciding body in Fedora would recruit some independent expert help, and get comments when the dataset collected is modified.

The goal would not be to cross some legal checkboxes, but to make a best honest effort to minimize any risks in the data collection. Especially when it is advertized as “privacy-preserving”, it has to be backed up by some real analysis that shows it really is privacy-preserving in some sense. I think right now, when it’s not clear what data will be collected and no guidelines have been yet agreed on etc., at least I don’t really know it is “privacy-preserving”.

I think the idea of expert oversight is a good one.