It was fun being on Fedora all this time, take care everyone!
Fine article, but definitely a bit of alarmist take by OP. This isn’t a for-profit situation, and devs don’t give a shit about spying on you. It’s something opt-in. Opt-out is not even allowed. So, ya know sites like https://linux-hardware.org ? That already exists. Steam Deck, the Linux world’s darling has actual anonymized telemetry data that is forced. So, yeah, let’s calm down with this alarmist attitude. This isn’t Windows land.
If it’s opt-in and the data is viewable by the user, what exactly is the problem? If privacy-conscious people don’t have to use it and it helps devs to prioritize their work, than everyone wins right? GNOME and KDE have the exact same thing and you can see exactly what gets sent. The text files are in plain site in .local. I personally opt-in to all Linux telemetry because I want Linux desktop to be as good as it can be.
Fake news.
However, we also want to ensure that the data we collect is meaningful, so gnome-initial-setup will default to displaying the toggle as enabled,even though the underlying setting will initially be disabled. (The underlying setting will not actually be enabled until the user finishes the privacy page, to ensure users have the opportunity to disable the setting before any data is uploaded.) This is to ensure the system is opt-out, not opt-in. This is essential because we know that opt-in metrics are not very useful. Few users would opt in, and these users would not be representative of Fedora users as a whole. We are not interested in opt-in metrics.
lol, read the whole thing. That was one person talking. Red Hat legal doesn’t want opt-out. Ya know, the evil IBM company?
