but if you just click Next like most users will do, it’ll be enabled
That's the definition of opt-out, so they're telling the truth :) Opt-out is the worse alternative when it comes to unwanted features, opt-in would have been better.
It's still a proposal if you have more to say about opt-in/opt-out specifically they made a new thread to discuss it here
Opt-out helps you capture the group of users that simply do not care about telemetry.
As someone who recently started developing an open-source GUI application for a few thousand users I cannot stress enough how instrumental telemetry has been in fixing a variety of crashes.
I think you mixed up opt out and opt in in the title
Metrics can be very valuable, the people who really care can just uncheck the box as part of the initial installation. I regularly submit crash reports which contain far more personal information. I think this is a good move.
red hat, what are you doing
P R O F I T
That's lip service to privacy with spyware in reality.
Do you know how this will affect existing installations? Is this gnome only or any desktop?
States the gnome-initial-setup. KDE is big on telemetry only being opt-in, so it seems like just the gnome environment. Or at least I hope I'm right...
It won't affect existing installations, definitely won't. You may get a "Welcome Screen" on a new GNOME update that enables it if you just click next.
No idea about KDE, Fedora higher ups don't care about it but KDE does have support for Welcome Screens, they'll likely use that if they can.
But this is merely for the moment, you've seen how Red Hat has treated CentOS, they're carefully calculating each move, justifying each mistake, if this passes through they'll eventually shamelessly switch to opt-out telemetry.
Though I'm curious how does teletry work in a GNU/Linux system? Is there some daemon like 'telemetryd' that watches /var/log or something..?
On Endless OS, applications use a D-Bus API (via a small C library, eos-metrics) to record metrics events locally on the device. This API is implemented by a system-wide service, named eos-metrics-event-recorder or eos-event-recorder-daemon (no, I don’t know why it has two different names either), which buffers those events in memory, and periodically submits them anonymously to a server, Azafea, which ingests them into a PostgreSQL database (after a short layover in a Redis queue). If the computer is offline – often the case for Endless OS systems! – events are persisted to a size-limited ring buffer on disk, and submitted when the computer is online.
From https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2023/07/05/endless-oss-privacy-preserving-metrics-system/
Fedora says they intend to deploy endlessOS's metric system
I’m almost certain that is not conform with GDPR in europe to pre-enable checkboxes.
I’m no lawyer but I read it that way and will probably be disappointed.
If it collects user data it is not. If it collects “1 person downloaded an update” it’s perfectly fine
I agree, but whatever they say ... who do I trust? I'm paranoid enough to trust only my own network capture.
If only it was open source. Or if only you could actually do your own network capture. 🤷
I'm happier than ever that I moved to a different distro. I was a Fedora user since they started and was happy to use it for a few years at the job. But seeing what's happening with the whole red hat shit it makes me sad for the people who gave a lot of their time and passion for this.
It's getting harder and harder for the Fedora devs to show they are independent of red hat...
That said, Fedora Legal has determined that if we collect any personally-identifiable data, the entire metrics system must be opt-in. Since we are only interested in opt-out metrics due to the low value of opt-in metrics, we must accordingly never collect any personally-identifiable data.
Looks like this statement contradicts with their goal.
How, exactly? They've been saying from the very beginning that they don't need or want personally-identifiable data.
Opt-in = Low value metrics
Opt-out = Better metrics
If I read that right, looks like Fedora is justifying application of opt-out metrics as long as there's little/no PII present in the data collected.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0