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The Register spotted Ubuntu behaving badly again with respect to users' privacy. In their article "Ubuntu wants to slurp PCs' vital statistics – even location – with new desktop installs: Data harvest notice will be checked by default", they note that in addition to installing popcon and apport by default, Canonical seeks much deeper data mining (without using the word "telemetry"):
[...] "We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
[...] Data Canonical seeks "would include" the following: Ubuntu Flavour, Ubuntu Version, Network connectivity or not, CPU family, RAM, Disk(s) size, Screen(s) resolution, GPU vendor and model, OEM Manufacturer, Location (based on the location selection made by the user at install). No IP information would be gathered, Installation duration (time taken), Auto login enabled or not, Disk layout selected, Third party software selected or not, Download updates during install or not, [and] LivePatch enabled or not.
The system plans to leverage the power of the default setting by making the choice opt-out, not opt-in as popcon has been in the past: Cooke explained to the ubuntu-devel audience that "Any user can simply opt out by unchecking the box, which triggers one simple POST stating, 'diagnostics=false'. There will be a corresponding checkbox in the Privacy panel of GNOME Settings to toggle the state of this."
El Reg also noted Ubuntu's plan to address user privacy concerns:
"The Ubuntu privacy policy would be updated to reflect this change."
This seems less egregious than Ubuntu's past invasions of privacy, but much more invasive and Windows 10-like.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:16PM (3 children)
What about computer name/hostname?
If not, then it looks like less intrusive feedback than Mozilla has been vacuuming up, and most of it looks like data that provides important feedback for usability related issues, a number of which I have discovered recently, especially in newer kernel versions (The biggest being HGST USB 3.0 enclosures hanging due to the uas drive in any kernel after 3.13 or so, and at least some RV8xx series gpus displays getting corrupted/over white with the 4.14 kernel under debian/devuan and the open source 2016 linux-firmware dpkg instead of the proprietary 2017 package.) These sorts of showstopped bugs for some users have been becoming more and more frequent. Worst yet, many of them *ARE* documented online, even in the right bugtrackers, but developers either don't have the devices or ability to reproduce the issues and thus they never get fixed.
FYI, also a gentoo user, but sometimes you need packages installed *NOW*, not in the 15 minutes to 72+ hours it takes to compile the particular package and all its prerequisites :D Devuan is a lot faster to install and update with fewer interdependency issues on average than gentoo as well.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:38PM (1 child)
If, as you say, bugs get reported anyway, what's the point of the whole drill.
Back to topic, which bugs are triggered by a different geographical location of the hardware? 1 in 10000000? So why report that?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @08:41PM
It is just using the location the user selected when installing. Hardly fine-grained data. While not strictly necessary to collect (excepting for bugs in the installer), the location is used to set the timezone and provide defaults for localisation. And bugs can be related to those settings far more often than your 1 in 10000000.
It would be more appropriate to simple just record the timezone and localisation settings directly. I expect the reason they are collecting it is because they want better data on how much it is used in different countries.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday February 20 2018, @07:34PM
Doubt it.
They said
Yet after decades of promoting linux for older and weaker machines, just about every distro swept 32bit machines into the trash bin, just because an extra compilation run was too much trouble. (I look around my home computer room and see three such 32bit machines that I've been runing linux on for years).
Would they have maintained 32bit distros if they had this telemetry?
It seems to me they ram crap down our throats regardless of what we say, totally ignoring what most users want.
So why give them any more data? They ignore us anyway, why give them a bigger stick to beat us with?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.