I cannot speak for all of those folks, but I can speak for myself. I am a FESCo member elected by the community. Despite being a Red Hat employee allowed to dedicate a certain amount of my working time to FESCo things, being on FESCo is not my job and I am not in FESCo to represent Red Hat. Nobody from Red Hat management has ever asked me to vote in a particular way and if they did I’d told them to stop. Only once I received an email from a higher-up about a FESCo/modularity matter which could be considered a bit persuasive but I decided to act in the community’s best interest anyway.
For example, if I see that this change proposal is a no-go for our community (as it seems), I will vote -1 for this proposal. There is no evil Red Hat/IBM person hovering over me making me approve this. (Or at least there hasn’t been one before I sent this.)
(Off-topic: I don’t think this forum is going to solve the “long threads on devel” problem, it’s already quite hard to follow the various discussions here.)
This couldn’t have come at a worse time. How tone-deaf to not only outright refuse making the telemetry opt-in rather than opt-out, but to also suggest that those of us who would willingly turn on this telemetry feature would only provide “garbage” data! Extremely unimpressed with Red Hat lately.
Reminder: I won’t reply to posts that mention GDPR. This proposal has been developed in consultation with Fedora Legal. They are here to help ensure that what we do is not illegal.
Your elaboration in this topic conflicts with the arguments of Fedora Legal you proposed. I do not believe that any lawyer told you that you should only care about your database and that nothing else has relations to GDPR. I think to have read that legality issues have been also proposed in the mailing list?
Even if it would be different, your disrespect of users’ worries and thoughts, but also your belief that you can decide for the community that GDPR or other privacy issues are a “must” that is not worth further discussion once a lawyer said its legal, will not support your position.
I really hope that the development here but also the development in the devel mailing list will cause this to end soon, because I see this to develop to a danger and a split to the community, with this discussion and some of its points on itself to damage trust.
Just because it’s legal, it doesn’t mean it’s right.
There is a good reason why the GDPR is so clear about it if personal data is involved.
Consent should be specific, informed, unambiguous, cover all processing activities, and not inferred from silence or pre-ticked boxes, must be clear, concise and non-disruptive.
I think this is a miscommunication. It isn’t that Michael is dismissing anyone’s worries or thoughts. However, it’s never helpful for non-legal-experts to offer legal advice or make strong claims about what the law says. I’m not saying it’s happening here, but I’ve seen plenty of online conversations with frankly wild claims about what the GDPR does or does not compel. Let’s please keep the conversation to what we want to do and how we want to do it, and trust that we will make sure that whatever we do follows all of our legal obligations.
I definitely do not consider myself a GDPR expert and I hated the GDPR exams at university (not law school, only information security and IR ; ), but some of the comments in here reject everything I learned about it and what we have to implement in organizations.
The data that shall leave GDPR area (btw, why do countries apply to be certified by GDPR if personal data is allowed to leave the area anyway?) is able to create profiles. Your legal says that needs opt-in based upon the proposal, and that this also applies to data that can later be put together to become personal. You cannot exclude that from discussion, force that we trust in that a team in the back knows best and argue for a transparent proposal. The argumentation in this topic already undermines trust.
What convinces you that such topics do not belong to what people want and how to? This is a prejudice. I am myself not really a proponent of the GDPR and I see many issues in it, but it ensures some basics in privacy that are important for many users, while data processing in the US has a contrary reputation and is rejected by many. This in conjunction with the argumentation about why and what to exclude from discussion can create harmful perceptions. To assume that related questions have nothing to do with “what and how to do” and to exclude them from discussion is questionable imho.
If this change proposal is approved, the work would be implemented in GNOME (or other upstream components, as appropriate). (The code would be effectively inactive on other distros that do not have the Endless metrics system installed.) Endless has done 98% of the work, so it wouldn’t be accurate to call it an entirely Red Hat effort.
If we do indeed have other OS components that are already collecting their own data separately from this, then we’ll just have to clarify that the Fedora data collection policy (which we are still in the process of drafting) only applies to data collected by Fedora, and not by other OS components that have their own separate upstream data collection.
Let me try to be more clear, then. This proposal as written was reviewed a lawyer who specializes in data protection regulation, including the GDPR. To be completely honest, they seemed puzzled by how little we are trying to collect and the measures taken to separate it from any identifying information. From a strictly legal standpoint, we’ve been cleared for this as proposed, and probably could get approval to do something much more invasive (even though I have and see absolutely no desire to do so).
While Red Hat is US-based, Fedora operates in the EU and provides services to people in Europe. Hence, the cookie notice — annoying or not, it’s the rules! — and we do strictly follow processes compliant with the GDPR.
Ok. Now I think there is a miscommunication/misunderstanding (to be on the same page: this is not meant sarcastic or so). I thought that much of this topic elaborated what data shall be collected, and that it is not yet clear what/how to collect? (At least, it was not clear when the proposal was put forward?)
Beyond that, to go back to my previous point, you still cannot argue that once a lawyer says its legal, no further discussion about privacy shall take place and that all privacy concerns have to be satisfied by the legal argument? This is what I read from some of the points here (less from yours).
I don’t think anyone is meaning to say this. Michael said he wasn’t going to argue about the GDPR, which I took in the way I’m saying about the strictly legal factor. We’re obviously definitely still having (as we should be!) a big discussion about privacy concerns overall!
I wouldn’t normally bother with a post such as this, because really, who ultimately cares. However, since one of the themes of this topic is data points, I’ll write it anyway giving an unambiguous data point. The arrogance and the level of condescension towards users in the proposal and more so in some of the replies by different people here is far more troubling than the proposal itself. Perhaps it was always a bad assumption on my part, but I had believed the people involved with and behind Fedora had respect for the user. It’s clear at this point that assumption is either entirely inaccurate or at a bare minimum needs a series of asterisks.
This isn’t a thread about solving any issues or how to make things better, it’s about a decision that has already been made and how can it be implemented without breaking things critically. The majority of the people in this thread pushing this proposal are Red Hat employees and I think it’s beyond cheeky that only one or two have had the presence of mind to be clear about that when posting.
It was given as a reply to another poster, but I will take Michael Catanzaro’s advice and over the weekend discontinue all use of Fedora Linux.
I wouldn’t normally bother with a post such as this, because really, who ultimately cares. However, since one of the themes of this topic is data points, I’ll write it anyway giving an unambiguous data point. The arrogance and the level of condescension towards users in the proposal and more so in some of the replies by different people here is far more troubling than the proposal itself. Perhaps it was always a bad assumption on my part, but I had believed the people involved with and behind Fedora had respect for the user. It’s clear at this point that assumption is either entirely inaccurate or at a bare minimum needs a series of asterisks.
This isn’t a thread about solving any issues or how to make things better, it’s about a decision that has already been made and how can it be implemented without breaking things critically. The majority of the people in this thread pushing this proposal are Red Hat employees and I think it’s beyond cheeky that only one or two have had the presence of mind to be clear about that when posting.
It was given as a reply to another poster, but I will take Michael Catanzaro’s advice and over the weekend discontinue all use of Fedora Linux.
RedHat are at least asking first, which is a progress in itself. I know of a distro developing company that didn’t ask when they added telemetry and they had to remove it 3 years later after many users criticized them for that on different forums.
We are trying to deal with the trust issue through things like full open source implementation of both client and server and through using community elected organs like FeSCo to make ongoing decisions about what will be measured.
And being able to both target current investments into Fedora and the Linux desktop better and also hopefully be able to use the data to get more investment is a big gain in my view. You are of course free to disagree.
Sorry for remaining a bit penetrant. I have made my points and I think there is not much to add from my side. But I think the above is worth elaboration, and I could imagine that I am not the only one who is a little confused about the “data” elaborations of the owners.
I see a realistic chance that the proposal is rejected by Fesco/Council with regards to the community opinion. But I am not convinced if the negative community opinions are really all based upon “we don’t want that at all” but some may be based on that “trust us, we clarified that internally” shall be no argument in a community.
Thus, in the sense of transparency, what is this about? On one hand, it is said that the legal people approved it and highlighted that you are trying to collect so little and that what you want to collect is nothing personal so that you can avoid opt-in. On the other hand, it has been highlighted in this topic several times that it is not yet clear what data shall be collected and how to transport+store it (please let me know if I misunderstood something), while at the same time some of the given “illustrative examples” of data presented to the community allow profiling. But when asking, it is referred back to the lawyers who approved it, or alternatively that it is not yet clear what data will be collected (… while we still shall approve and just trust in the owners’ team).
Please, some untangling / elaboration of the conflicting argumentation chain would be appreciated. I do not exclude that I misunderstood something since these discussions have become very hard to read (especially if one follows both discourse and the devel mailing list). But I think clarifying these issues and conflicts, and untangling them in a post would be supportive for the discussion, and can only support the owners…
This thread is an appropriate place to discuss privacy concerns. I’ve no objections to discussing privacy here. We should be designing this system to reduce privacy concerns to the greatest degree possible and the best place to provide feedback on that is right here. We’ve already received some rather specific feedback about possible privacy improvements, which I need to add to the change proposal.
(However, I am not qualified to respond to legal concerns. And Fedora Legal is not going to discuss legal concerns in public. So this isn’t a good place for those.)