Exactly. The argument for telemetry seems to be to make things better for the users but getting telemetry seems to result in additions of things users don’t want, the removal of things users do want, users being taken advantage of and the user experience becoming worse. The argument that telemetry will make the user experience better, IMO, is extremely weak.
There is not a “they” here. This is Fedora, and while the team proposing this is a group of developers working at Red Hat, everyone on that team is an individual human being — each with a long, positive history working as part of the project.
By taking part of this conversation, you are also acting as a Fedora contributor — you are in our project discussion space. Fedora has long taken an open stance about what exactly defines a contributor,[1] and we likewise keep “soft” line between “Fedora user” and “Fedora contributor” — there is no big initiation ceremony or anything.
On the other side of the same coin, long-term contributors may have more influence and access due to relationships and accumulated trust — but that doesn’t mean they automatically get their way.[2] We have processes, and we share ideas, and we build together.
I feel like some people have come into this conversation with a different mindset, like angry users on some uservoice-style “feedback management” tool. That’s not what this is.
I want people who have seen themselves as “just” users to feel welcome to participate in this kind of conversation. That’s important. But to do so, you need to let go of “they”. This is about us — all of us.
see Fedora Strategy 2028: What is a contributor? What is a contribution? for some recent discussion on that ↩︎
even as Fedora Project Leader, I don’t get anything without convincing people it’s a good idea ↩︎
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I would argue this is what you get when you are a project with limited resources and need to allocate them wisely. There are no “focus groups” working on Gnome Desktop other than the developers.
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They as an improper plural pronoun was referring to the devs and the people making this proposal. Are you upset by me referring to these individuals apart from the larger group of individuals that make up the whole of those who are interested in or use Fedora?
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ICYMI, it’s already been mentioned that the proposal is being revised and will be re-proposed with explicit choice required. Opt-in / Opt-Out? A breakout topic for the F40 Change Request on Privacy-preserving telemetry for Fedora Workstation - #425 by catanzaro
I only quoted that word because that’s what I wanted to focus on. But, you said:
… and that’s the “they” I object to. In a previous earlier post, it’s clear you’re using “they” as you describe just now. Sure, that would be silly to complain about. In the “slippery slope” line, though, I took that as a rhetorical flourish. If you really did mean that as, well, a personal attack, that’s … not better.
Telemetry will never be a good idea and it will never improve your product.
Let me explain. So you make a program or whatever, and you want to see what is good and used and what is not. So you say telemetry will help. That is such a wrong approach.
First, just because somebody is using something doesn’t mean that is necessarily good, maybe the user has nothing better to use or just that alternative is non existing and you use what you get, or maybe you just don’t know about it.
Second, if you make something and just want to see if somebody will use it or not, doesn’t tell you WHY a person is using it or not. And if you want to make “improvements”, you won’t know in which direction to go unless you ask your users. You can always put “another telemetry” and it will still tell you nothing. And you will still be limited with your own ideas and your own approach to things.
Let me give you a simple stupid example. I use Kate for one and only reason, because it has terminal built in, and i can quickly access it when i need it. Now, I need that terminal rarely, but when I need it I really want it to be there, and not to need to open Konsole in another window. The same thing with block mode in Kate. I use it rarely, but when I do need it, I need that specific feature and nothing else. And I will always install Kate and not some other editor because I don’t need bunch of editors on my system, and Kate has everything I need.
Now, telemetry will show you that I use Kate editor very often, but the built in terminal and block mode, not so much >> conclusion Kate good, terminal and block mode in Kate bad. You get rid of them, and I stop using Kate all together and your telemetry will never tell you why. Was it because you removed terminal, or because you removed block mode, or was it because I found something better, or was it some other reason.
No number will ever tell you about user experience and it will never improve your features in a product.
And if you are interested in server side and usage, no workstation will give you the right picture, and Redhat has their subscribers to tell them what they need to know.
Second part of the telemetry is that I don’t believe that there is such a thing as anonymous data. You always know at least from which IP the data came, because you couldn’t send it otherwise. Everybody says they don’t store that data, and some maybe don’t, but there is always a big possibility that somebody does without the knowledge of the parties involved, and they always do and that’s why you have so much “apologies” over the internet when personal data is concerned.
For almost 30 years you developed your software without any telemetry, to create it now, even with opt-in feature is just a big lie about it’s reasons. Redhat was sold for 34$ billions without Fedora’s telemetry, so clearly you don’t need it. And if you really cared about your users, you would not allow gnome 3.x to exists for so long, and gnome extensions would be the default “feature”.
I use Fedora since it was still Redhat in the late 1999, but if any telemetry is put in I will drop it without a blink. I don’t need my OS to analyze anything, and I certainly don’t need it to send anything to some computer on the internet.
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Saying that if you give devs an inch when it comes to telemetry, those devs will end up taking a mile is a personal attack? Really? Maybe this council is upstanding, sure, but you don’t look at rules or policies with the current people making decisions right now, you look at those things with the perspective of anyone in charge. A policy might be put in place with a good intention but have unintended consequences.
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The expression “if you give them an inch, they will take a mile” generally is understood to mean “they will take advantage of us”. Either you are talking about some theoretical “out there” they, which is what I am talking about back in this message, or you are accusing the proposers of a malicious secret intent.
If neither of those are what you mean, that too gives good reason to avoid hyperbole and dramatic idioms. They are easy to misinterpret, which does not tend towards constrictive conversation.
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The whole word police of people that are just making points and not actually saying anything wrong while Fedora is basically trying to take more and more of people’s data without EXPLICIT consent is getting really old.
What is wrong with that? Why have fedora users HAVE to assume goodwill from those on payroll of a corporate driven by profit? Isn’t it fair to have at least minimum level of skepticism towards motives of those who are having bosses that can order them anything as long as it is not illegal per se., whether it is ethical or not?
I don’t know why you think it is okay for you to point some users are not being constructive, when it is just criticism based on clear idea that what is promised today, can be, and will be, broken tomorrow if it is in fedora/redhat/ibm favour regardless of what the community says, and the fact that after all this push back from community in this topic the only conclusion fedora team came to be is this proposal need to be formatted in different words make the case for those who are skeptical even more clear, and their fears of what could come next a meaningful concern.
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Everyone in this discussion thread is part of the “Fedora team”, including you. The proposal owner doesn’t have special say or access to implement a change. They can give their view in a proposal, we can try to change their minds, and they can pick up or put aside points as they like while trying to make their proposal something that is more likely to be approved. FESCo similarly will take the community’s input and their own expertise into account for the decision. If someone still believes in their change proposal they can continue the process to submit it to FESCo and shouldn’t feel pressured into not submitting unless they are convinced to do so.
If we separate this controversial topic from the process, the idea is to maximize input from the community, provide a way to move forward with Fedora development, and give room for all kinds of ideas to be presented without being booed out of consideration. It’s a balancing act to get the priorities straight and that can result in slowing down the process to consider the proposition more carefully when it’s controversial. In my opinion that’s a good thing, as I’d rather the community behind my distro make a thought out decision that took longer to arrive at rather than shooting from the hip, especially if it’s about a solution that could be modified into something workable. And it works to your benefit if there’s ever a change you would like to implement so that you aren’t immediately shown the door.
Put another way, this is the same change process we had when Fedora got popular in the last couple of years. I think it’s probably a good model to stick with in this difficult discussion. I’ll add that you are welcome to continue to be involved and be more active in the process going forward so that you can see this isn’t just a matter of “tech company steamrolls community.”
Also, it’s not the proposal owner’s position to change their proposal to be exactly in-line with the feedback they receive. It’s advisable that they listen of course, but they’re also submitting their proposal from their point of view. If their view doesn’t change with the discussion, then it stands to reason that their proposal won’t either. It’s actually FESCo’s role to represent the community. They are also reading the proposal and reading the community feedback. As I understand it, they’re the ones who need to be taking the community more into consideration when voting. The proposal owner is there to try to make their case. It’s FESCo who represents you in the final say.[1]
Lastly, just because the proposal hasn’t been rejected yet doesn’t mean that it won’t be rejected at the end of the day. The conversation will continue based on a new version of the proposal. Maybe it’s exactly the same with just explicit choice instead of opt-out. Maybe it’s something totally amenable to the majority of community members. Maybe it’s something worse than the original (unlikely)! At that time you can come back, read it, and have your say again.
I understand where most of the opponents of this proposal are coming from. I have argued against this proposal here and here. I participate in the privacy community and implement privacy and security measures that are above my threat model. I feel regularly demoralized by the state of digital privacy today and all the ways it’s being eroded. However, I’ve been involved with the Fedora Project as a volunteer contributor for a little over a year and have full confidence in the competence of this change process. I ask that you please consider yourself part of the “Fedora team” rather than othering the regular contributors we would otherwise be celebrating.
FESCo is community elected with elections happening after each Fedora release. Come back after F39 to have your say! ↩︎
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I have a policy that options are never a bad thing but even if this weren’t opt out its existence is still attack surface area so even if we wholeheartedly trust Redhat and their ambiguous usage of our data. That doesn’t stop threat actors from exploiting that data monitoring service at any point of the pipeline. We can trust our data on our PCs but we don’t have access to control your servers and PCs. It’s a security hole through and through and there is no way to patch it because no data collection can ever be 100% secure, other than not collecting said data. Which is what you should do. Which is already what’s done. If you are really clueless as to what needs dev time how about asking your users instead of spying on them.
“expect this proposal may need to be modified significantly depending on Fedora community feedback.”
It doesn’t need to be modified it needs to be abandoned. You saw what we did to Reddit, don’t make me lose my favourite OS.
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Dude, I’m not on the dev team, I’m not the one proposing this garbage policy. There is a distinction of contributers and users, whether you like that fact or not. So could you let this point go and stop playing word police and actually focus on the topic of my point instead if you’re going to keep commenting on this point?
And by the way, the people behind this don’t exactly have secret malicious intent. They were very clear that they don’t care about the end user’s concerns and in the face of harsh criticism against this move, there were jokes about employing dark patterns on the button they were going to inevitably implement.
This is an interesting proposal, I hope it goes through.
I remember trying to help Gnome in the past installing a script to send data for development purpose. But it was over complicated. So, if we get a checkbox instead during installation, it will be much simpler.
Now my question is, What happens when you upgrade? How can we opt-in?
I guess, it will be something to be resolved in the implementation.
I trust this project, otherwise I wouldn’t be using Fedora for production in my primary laptop.
As such, I’m all in with the proposal. And I hope it helps to improve this distribution even further !!
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Well, I already promised I would adjust the proposal to require an explicit consent action rather than an opt-out. Probably 80% of the feedback we received was requesting that. I consider that a pretty significant concession.
I’ve been continuing to read all the comments posted here and have attempted to summarize most of the feedback we received to show that I am at least paying attention and considering what you’re saying. That was a few weeks ago now, and since then I don’t think we’ve actually received much new feedback that doesn’t fit into any of the categories mentioned there. Most of what I see now is from users who do not want any metrics collected at all under any circumstances. This doesn’t leave any room for compromise, so there’s not really anything I can do about it other than withdraw the proposal entirely, which I’m not going to do.
I am going to need a few more weeks before releasing the next revision to the change proposal. Apologies that it’s taking so long.
A post was split to a new topic: OpenH264 in Fedora Linux
Initially we would collect data only from new installations, plus users who opt-in by toggling the setting in the Privacy panel of System Settings.
gnome-tour does already support showing pages to users who upgrade from a previous version of GNOME, so we could utilize that functionality to show a consent page to users who upgraded from a previous version of Fedora. But that requires a little extra work, and I’m not sure if it’s a perfect fit for this. I’d like to start by keeping things as simple as possible.
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80%?
I don’t see those 80% in the forum posts or in the poll Straw poll on your preferences about opt-in / opt-out for possible data collection
BTW Explicit choice got only 55% and Explicit opt-in 61%
Explicit choice : A feature is clearly presented with two options, enable or disable, and the risks/benefits are clearly laid out as part of the choice. The user must actively make a decision, and neither is considered the “default.”
So it clear stated, that there is no dark patterns in this option.
With your current proposal - Explicit choice with a dark pattern, I don’t see any significant concession at all.
I wonder will you keep the use of dark pattern in your final edition of proposal?
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Probably. For avoidance of doubt, the tentative design I imagine currently would have two buttons: “Do not allow” and “Allow” where the “Do not allow” button would have no background color and the “Allow” button would be blue (suggested-action style class, which is used pervasively throughout the OS). I don’t think it’s very reasonable to claim that the suggested-action style class is a “dark pattern,” but for anyone who feels it is, then yes, there would be a dark pattern.
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