Opt-in / Opt-Out? A breakout topic for the F40 Change Request on Privacy-preserving telemetry for Fedora Workstation

[theevilskeleton (Hari Rana)]

@dalto

This is a big point of contention. In order to collect this data, it means having both my IP address and/or other identifiable elements and behavioral information about me. To me that is high risk for my personal risk profile.

I quote:

@catanzaro

Although we assume the metrics server administrator is not malicious and will not actively attempt to deanonymize users, we will still take reasonable precautions to make it difficult to correlate metrics to a particular user, starting by not storing any IP address information in the metrics database. Additionally, each metric that we collect will be considered individual, non-correlatable data by default, unless approved to be correlated with particular other metrics via future Fedora community process. That is, if a user submits two data points, we usually don’t want the ability to know that these data points were both submitted by the same user.

To be fair, they do say “difficult” so I can see why there’s a risk to it, so you have a fair point. I apologize.

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@dalto

Do you have data that the group of Fedora users who are concerned about collecting behavioral telemetry are a “vocal minority”? I have seen nothing that supports that position so far. In fact, if anything, there is limited data demonstrating the opposite.

No, I do admit that I wrote this while I was annoyed, so I apologize. Point was, I’d pick the majority of the people who will get negatively affected by bad decisions over people who are concerned about opt-out telemetry.