Let’s be honest: the timing for such a proposal is very, very unfortunate, and this is going to add to the bad advertising all Red Hat-related products are under now. This is to suggest that the entire proposal should be crafted and announced very carefully.
I realize that the proposal authors wanted as much data as possible to drive their decisions and development, and I respect that desire: however, this proposal in this original form is really going to backfire.
I believe no one here truly neglects the importance of telemetry when it comes to gather insights about a representative portion of the population of users. Data in general is always useful, either in the present or in the future, and allows novel insights that weren’t simply possible before. No one questions the importance of data when driving decisions.
However, it seems to me that the way such a representative portion of consenting users is obtained is disappointing, to say the least. The idea that a representative portion of consensus can only be achieved through an opt-in button literally suggests that the users are considered uncapable of deciding, or are expected to mindlessly scroll through the menus and leave the telemetry button turned on, be it by mistake or not: otherwise, users would simply turn it on in the case they agreed, and that’s something the original proponents seem to know the users will not do.
From a privacy-respecting, and most importantly, user-respecting operating system as Fedora Linux is, I frankly expect the user privacy rights to to be actually protected by design.
My idea is the following, and is summarizable with this principle: don’t decide for the users, let the users decide for themselves. Do not present the positive, agreeing choice by default, but neither present the negative choice. Instead, show the user two equal-standing buttons: an ‘I agree’, and an ‘I do not agree’ button. Those buttons should not be preselected by default. Those buttons should not even hide behind dark patterns or resort on any similar well-known or novel trick. They should be perceived as equal in strength. They should be unequivocably clear, and should be accompanied by a simple and straightforward explanation that – if too long – should link to a “further informations” section for the more meticulous. Explanation should be simple and everything should be crystal clear. Users should not be made feel guilty in the case of no consent. And, very importantly, buttons must not be skippable: user cannot jump to the next section unless they established a decision. This means that no user can press ‘next next next’ and find their telemetry enabled. Users should be trusted, not tricked in any way, subtle or not.
I think the problem here is not the telemetry itself: the issue here is the lack of trust on end-users, and the resort on opt-out strategies to collect meaningful telemetry data. I strongly believe the users should be trusted (and, in this case, forced) to decide ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, clearly and with no obscure wording we typically witness in some user-disrespecting commercial products. There is no justification for a lack of respect towards users, no matter what is at stake.