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.
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.
Yeah, it’s not easy to do it the right way, and the word telemetry gets a bad connotation from the way it’s used by Microsoft and others. I understand why it makes people nervous. But it can absolutely be done and doing it in the open is the right way instead of using some proprietary solution. Shooting down the idea without even seeing their implementation is not productive.
I can see the concerns about having the box checked by default, but I see the flip side as well, as otherwise that leads to the same issue with selecting for a certain type of user and not getting a representative selection of data. It’s why it’s important to design it so that even if someone inadvertently leaves it on, they aren’t horrified if they see the data collected. That’s going to mean sacrifices to the amount and type of data in order to preserve privacy. Maybe they can have it unchecked by default but put a speed bump showing an example of what is collected and imploring users to enable it if they skip past that screen too quickly. These are the kinds of conversations we should be having about this.
Unfortunately people are a bit too conspiracy minded, many comments bring up the Red Had source controversy which is just ridiculous and completely unproductive (and also not controversial IMO but that’s a rant for another thread).