What data will be collected, exactly? — a breakout topic for the F40 Change Request on Privacy-preserving telemetry for Fedora Workstation

[farchord (Steve Cossette)]

@catanzaro

For avoidance of doubt, as not everyone will have read the “User control” section of the change proposal: the system is opt-out for everyone who sees the Privacy page in gnome-initial-setup, which is mandatory when installing Fedora Workstation. There you have to flip the switch to off or else data will be sent to Fedora. This switch is pretty prominent at the top of the dedicated Privacy page and it’s one click to disable, so I don’t think it’s a “dark pattern.” If you don’t like telemetry, just flip the switch and we’ll never collect anything (not even a report saying you flipped the switch, which is a bit of a shame, because it sure would be nice to know how many users disable the telemetry, like Ubuntu does).

Users will always be presented with this choice before any data is sent. E.g. if you are upgrading from a previous version of Fedora, then you don’t see gnome-initial-setup, and the system is opt-in, because we must not collect anything without user consent. To enable, you’d need to navigate to the Privacy page in gnome-control-center and flip the switch from off to on.

Fedora Legal says the switch has to be off by default if we collect any personal data. Therefore, we MUST NOT collect any personal data.

You know, alot of good points have been made in this proposal, and I feel like we got out of the “panicking” stage and are actually progressing now.

What I would suggest is that we concentrate on the “What” and the “How”. The “How” seems mostly figured out; it’s going to be a toggle on the gnome initial setup app. (Hoping there will be one under “Settings” too)

The “What” needs to be figured out now, as in, “What” do you want to capture? And I mean all of it. I know you said that you’d make a separate proposal about what you want to gather, but I don’t know that we will feel safe about approving this without knowing what will be tracked.

I know the list of “What” will be tracked will also change over time, but I’m asking for a full transparent list of what would be tracked. Then I think a sound decision can be taken.

But I am quite a bit more open to the idea than I was yesterday, before I read all the feedback here.