Just in the consideration phase, but makes you wonder the timing after the Red Hat move. Maybe alright if they do it the KDE way of needing to manually opt in and not like Cononical’s painful way of manually having to opt out. Or Firefox’s needing to manually opt out though easy.
Personally, I don’t mind this sort of telemetry so long as they’re open about it - which looks to be the plan, at least for the moment.
IMO the FOSS/Linux space has an odd relationship with telemetry that I think should change. I’d like to point out the gnome-info-collect debacle:
GNOME users: "GNOME devs don’t understand what we want!"
GNOME devs: “Hey, we want to get some data on how people use GNOME. If you’d like to help, install and run this one-off tool. Source code is here, and we collect XYZ metrics (all anonymized, of course.)”
(Some) GNOME users: screeching incoherently about data harvesting and telemetry
I think it’s fine. Actually, I think it’s even a good idea. As long as they are upfront with users and get consent and let them opt-out at any time.
I have been the person to implement telemetry in an app, and when done correctly it can really be useful for making the experience better for everyone. It doesn’t always have to be about monetization and ads and tracking you across the web. Without data, you’re flying blind, you rely on users to self-report data to you and that selects for the more technical, knowledgeable users, who may not be having an experience that is representative of your average user.
Some real examples: I added monitoring for the type of exceptions thrown and how often they occur. When we push updates, we have alerts that fire and stop the update if the client error rate increases with the new version. Another is the browser or OS type and version, not the full user agent either, a redacted version to avoid fingerprinting. This helps us determine if it’s safe to start using a new API or standard. Other things we monitored were performance related, like measuring the time from app open to when it has actually loaded data and become responsive. That helped us catch some regressions or determine if improvements we made actually made a difference in the real world. None of this was ever used for ads or for tracking users, it was all for making our app better.
To me, it looks like this is what Fedora has in mind, not something malicious. With the client side code open source, we can trust but verify.
I think it’s a little backwards that telemetry is so frowned upon in FOSS programs, because in my eyes they can benefit the most from usage data, as they don’t have the resources for large testing teams. But it needs to be implemented very carefully not to violate GDPR, the GPL license where applicable, etc, so I see why it’s a hard problem to solve.
Users will have the option to disable data upload before any data is sent for the first time. Our service will be operated by Fedora on Fedora infrastructure, and will not depend on Google Analytics or any other controversial third-party services. And in contrast to proprietary software operating systems, you can redirect the data collection to your own private metrics server instead of Fedora’s to see precisely what data is being collected from you, because the server components are open source too.
To be fair, if they want to collect telemetry data, this is probably the best way to do it.
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