Hi all,
I apologize that I haven’t been able to read all the feedback in this breakout topic yet. I intend to read every comment that has been posted here, but haven’t been able to yet due to the high number of comments.
That said, it’s obvious there is a very large number of you who are not happy with the opt-out consent toggle. I wasn’t expecting this to be the most controversial part of the proposal since it is one click to turn off the toggle, but, well, collecting feedback is what the change proposal process is for. I had been really hoping we wouldn’t need to do an explicit consent system where the user is forced to make a choice with no default value, but based on the large amount of negative feedback on this aspect of the plan, it looks like this is something we’ll need to consider. (This was originally proposed by Qwerty here, and refined by Cassidy here).
My original proposal was designed with the promise that no data is ever uploaded if the user does not consent. The problem with the explicit consent system is that we would need to collect one data point from users who not consent to data collection: a boolean to indicate they did not consent to data collection. That’s hardly very invasive (and I believe Ubuntu does this already, for example), but it’s one data point more than the zero I had been planning to collect from users who don’t consent. This is really important because without knowing the consent rate, we can’t know how good all the other data is. If half of users consent, that’s probably good enough. If 2% of users consent, that data is not useful and we shouldn’t rely on it. If there is a low consent rate, we would need to make changes to how the consent is presented in hopes increasing the number of users who consent, or give up and rip out the telemetry entirely. But we would never know if it’s working or not if we don’t collect data on how many users consent.
So despite my initial reluctance, that’s where I’m at now. I’m curious to see opinions on whether this would be acceptable. Responding to community feedback is very important to me, but please keep in mind we do need to ensure that the collected data is actually representative of Fedora users, as otherwise there’s no point to collecting data in the first place.