a proposal to add opt-out telemetry in fedora is being discussed on fedora forums
discussion.fedoraproject.org
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/782760
the proposal is from a red-hat team member and is proposing addition of "privacy-respecting" telemetry. here's the link to the hyperkitty thread
Being opt-out instead of opt-in is icky. I don't have much faith in RedHat related projects after the recent debacles (RHEL trying to kill off Alma and Rocky and Fedora's project manager being fired with no replacement).
As a Fedora user, I'm really tired of being disappointed. Gonna wait for my vacation to switch to Debian.
curious of torvalds' stance on this, 'cause if i remember correctly, he was a fedora user too.
I imagine him being annoyed at most, but only switching if something break. He's way more focused on pragmatism than ethics (not implying he doesn't think about the ethics standpoint)
Opt out?
All of this should be opt in. It says something about the culture once again. Microsoft also does "opt out" instead of in, which is morally wrong.
You are right, but Microsoft allows you to opt out of some of the data collection, but it can never be fully disabled by traditional methods.
Did you even read it?
Some guy sent an email to the mailing list suggesting that could collect stats on whether Fedora runs on spinning rust anymore and if people struggle to find settings.
It's a proposal, no one has even voted of whether it's a good idea. And the suggestions also involve you running your own telemetry server instead of using Fedoras so you can see what sort of software is more popular in your organisation.
You are reading far too much into a project that doesn't have to accept anything that Red Hat suggests.
Fair point, thank you.
Sorry, upon reflection that seemed quite strong. However the reason the suggestion for opt-out rather than opt-in is you end up with a self selected group which is basically worthless. The proposal isn't to hide the opt-out, and in fact have it as part of the setup flow but they are trying to gather useful information.
This isn't like Microsoft who will send telemetry data back home before giving you the chance to fully remove all telemetry, or Ubuntu sending data to Amazon before you get to uninstall the Amazon lense, or whatever they are doing these days.
They will respect your decision. If not then we can always just leave.
Fair point. I guess it's easy to overreact to these things since we are all tired of not being respected privacy-wise.
There's telemetry on Fedora? 👀
They're discussing adding it, with a opt-out option.
If added, should be opt-in only, with a default to off.
I agree, just like debian package statistics
Oh ok.
And this is why I didn't fully believe it when people were saying Red Hats antics wouldn't affect Fedora upstream.
What alternatives are there to Fedora that offer a similar balance of stability and regular releases?
OpenSUSE maybe, if you don’t mind an other corporate overlord.
Let's all hope that Fedora dies. Redhat/IBM is already owned by BlackRock.
I think that's fine. Your privacy is as valuable as you think it is. If you care about privacy, then you'll be on the lookout for this but if you don't even care to bother taking a look at what you're signing up for, you obviously don't care about your privacy
I gotta agree. So long as the option isn’t hidden, I think it’ll help improve the quality of fedora. The FOSS community has a knee jerk reaction when telemetry is mentioned, but it’s all about giving the end user the freedom to choose which encompasses them being aware of it in the first place. When that stops being provided, we should be angry.