F40 Change Request: Privacy-preserving Telemetry for Fedora Workstation (System-Wide)

[uraeus (Christian F.K. Schaller)]

The problem is that if we send out a poll asking for example 'should we continue shipping Firefox in Fedora (random example) the chance is that the people who choose to respond is the people using Firefox, while it will tell us nothing about if they represent 1% of Fedora users, 10% of Fedora users, 50% of Fedora users or 100% of Fedora users.

[raxel-pepi (Lucas Varsky)]

Good to see making each spin decide to include/not include.
Why is not adding a “Privacy” option to Anaconda that requires the user to select an option before installing a bad idea? It’s universal (the argument for opt-out is to increase numbers) and it almost guarantees that users will read how their data is used.

[yump (R Haley)]

I don’t like polling and prefer forced-opt telemetry, however it seems you could ask the user whether they were willing to participate in a poll and either submit results or an explicitly empty result, before showing them what the poll was about.

That way you’d have counts for

A - Keep distributing Firefox
B - Stop distributing Firefox
C - No response

[uraeus (Christian F.K. Schaller)]

Maybe because understanding if Fedora Workstation users are using GNOME Terminal or Terminator isn’t in any way or form comparable to killing people with a gun?

[uraeus (Christian F.K. Schaller)]

That poll would only be valuable if I could know how representative of Fedora users it is and also if people have considered the tradeoffs possible. Ie. could the investment in Firefox be moved to VS Code for example. The telemetry data, if representative, could give us quite strong data to make such a decision, while a poll would most likely be distorted by self selection ie. the people wanting to keep firefox is a lot more motivated to participate than the people who don’t care.

[uraeus (Christian F.K. Schaller)]

There is no abuse here, there is only an attempt at gathering data that would allow Fedora to become a better operating system for its users.

[nadb]

My point was not to make this about whether the data is a matter of life or death, but simply to show that the options presented are either an open assault on a persons privacy, or a choice they are making. Being assaulted is never pleasant.

[glitch9138 (Stew Cassidy)]

Is it worth the loss in trust, though? Just like there are no numbers on how many will leave, there are also no numbers on how quantifiable the improvements will be from implementing this. It is just a promise right now

[catanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

@mxanthropocene

I don’t mean to be offensive or anything but I really don’t like the way you talk about the user community. That those of us who prefer privacy-by-default are people who would “complain” and “make a ruckus”, as if we’re unreasonable for wanting our data to stay on our computers as much as possible.

Complaining and making a ruckus is good if it stops us from overreaching.

I am of course hoping to pass this change proposal, but I don’t thinking complaining is bad and I don’t want to imply any disrespect for doing so.

@mxanthropocene

You’ve also still provided absolutely no answer as to why this really needs to be opt-out rather than opt-in*, or why you believe that those of us who would opt-in would provide “garbage” data. That’s also something that really doesn’t sit right with me.

The problem is that if the data is not opt-out, then the small minority of users who opt-in – say 5% of users – are not going to be representative of typical Fedora users. You and I and the others who respond in this discussion are likely very different from typical users. We don’t want to be making decisions with only a limited amount of data.

For example, Endless collects telemetry when users attempt to run Windows binaries, so it knows what applications users are failing to run. The most popular application is Roblox “by a very wide margin.” I had never even heard of Roblox before I saw Will’s blog post draft. I doubt I’m alone here.

Here’s another example. In the GNOME user survey results we found that 55% of users are using Fedora and only 10% are using Ubuntu. Because this was a survey that requires manual effort to run, the results are even less representative than opt-in telemetry would be, but the general idea is the same: failure to collect data from a representative sample of users means the results of that data are highly suspect. In reality, we know Ubuntu has more users than all other Linux distros combined, and the discrepancy between typical users vs. users who responded to the survey make it difficult to rely on the survey results. That same survey also says 50% of users have installed shell extensions (this survey excludes extensions that are installed by default) which defies credulity, and that more than 50% of users have GIMP, VLC, and Steam installed.

That’s not to say the survey was not interesting. E.g. maybe we should be prioritizing shell extensions more since they’re evidently very interesting to our most motivated users. But for Fedora telemetry, it’s essential that the data be representative of typical Fedora users, and if the data collection is off by default, or if there’s no default and the user is required to explicitly decide, it won’t be.

I’m actually a little surprised this point seems to be so concerning because it is very very easy to turn off. I don’t think anybody would accuse us of making it easy to miss the data collection switch in gnome-initial-setup. It’s not like users will not know that the telemetry is enabled: if you don’t see the switch, it’s disabled.

[paradoxguitarist (Brian Monroe)]

I don’t think it’s ethical to make that choice for users especially when the OS is marketed as “It’s your Operating System”.

I agree. Beyond that, while the argument is that it’s to help us achieve our goals for “Features” and “First” I would also argue that it flies in the face of “Freedom” and “Friends”. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice some of our values to make headway in others. I hope FESCO uses that as part of their decision.

[glitch9138 (Stew Cassidy)]

Also just wanted to point out, is it really “representative” if it is only taking into account the GNOME spin anyway?

[catanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

@dwaris

It doesn’t really fit this topic here and yes I don’t have the telemetry, funny. I was not talking about long term users count only about the time Gnome 3 was released. Everybody stopped using it. Cinnamon and Mate was developed and Canonical stopped contributing to Gnome and switched to Unity.
The only point I wanted to make about current Gnome is that basic features of an desktop environment are still missing, which clearly are demanded by the community. And the telemetry in Gnome is not helping with these kind of issues. Because telemetry can only be collected about things already present.
So including preselected telemetry won’t magically solve all issues.
Sorry if it was badly phrased.

Thing is, I don’t believe you when you say everybody stopped using GNOME 3, because I was using GNOME 3. In fact, I switched from Windows to Fedora shortly after GNOME 3 was released only because I liked the GNOME 3 design. If not for GNOME 3, I would probably still be using Windows right now, and somebody else would be writing this change proposal instead.

To convince me that everybody switched to Cinnamon and MATE and Unity, you would need to show me data, which we do not have without this change proposal. Telemetry at least gives us a chance to understand what users prefer (although spins would need to enable it to be counted).

[uraeus (Christian F.K. Schaller)]

It is representative of the users of Fedora Workstation (aka the GNOME spin) which I think is somewhere around 80% of the total Fedora userbase. If any of the spins wants to opt-in they would of course have to do the work to enable it and also obviously some of the data will be desktop specific (.ie what extensions people like to use).