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)]

@fatka

Exactly! Maybe there could be a granular permission system who gets to access the data. Otherwise anyone has access to it, and the user is unnecessarily giving a broader permission, violating one of the core tenets of security/privacy.

But some of this data — on the system, that is — is available to all software on that system, at least as things are now. (We could do a lot more sandboxing, but that’s a whole 'nuther layer of work.) Right now, if some third-party app you install wants to copy all of your hardware info, the installed package set, and /etc/passwd, there’s not really anything to stop it.