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KDE's Telemetry: The Tip Of The Iceberg?:
Recently, there was a debate on the PCLinuxOS forum about KDE Plasma's implementation of telemetry through KUserFeedback. While in PCLinuxOS, we can remove it without any collateral effects to the system, while other users reported that doing the same in other distros (like Debian 11) results in the complete removal of KDE Plasma! Why force such an implementation, if, as KDE's developers say, it is just an innocuous, privacy-respecting measure?
Coincidence or not, in the past years many popular Linux distributions started rolling out optional telemetry. Then it was the time of computer programs: news broke out in May regarding Audacity, a popular audio editing app, which announced it was starting the use of telemetry. The move was finally pushed back after users revolted against it.
While many point out that the data collection is by opt-in and entirely anonymous, others have found that, even if you don't activate telemetry, data is still collected, using computer resources, registering "apps and boot, number of times used and duration in /home/user/telemetry folder." As such, they argue that, because of the way Linux permissions work, other programs could have access to these log files. KUserFeedback's FAQs page confirms this:
"KUserFeedback is designed to be compliant with KDE Telemetry Policy, which forbids the usage of unique identification. If you are using KUserFeedback outside of the scope of that policy, it's of course possible to add a custom data source generating and transmitting a unique id."
Do any Soylentils have opinions about this, or experiences with it?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by corey on Thursday September 30 2021, @10:33PM (11 children)
I’m in the anti-telemetry camp. It seems to have been normalised by Microsoft and we forget that one day software was able to be made - to good quality - without it.
I guess my thought now is that they (KDE) could go ahead with it, but they really need to spend a lot of effort in educating the users what it is intended for, how it will be used, what it collects and when. And be really transparent so to minimise skepticism. Mozilla are doing this with their Firefox password remember system, well others might disagree. But KDE could justify it on the grounds that they really need to know how people use the system, where they can improve it and what bugs people are getting. But that’s going to be a lot of education and communications.
Otherwise we’re all going back to fluxbox. I use gentoo, sans systemd , there might be a compile flag to omit the telemetry.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday September 30 2021, @10:47PM (4 children)
I don't know about everybody else, but it doesn't matter to me how transparent they are, or how important they consider the data--I still don't want their software recording my behavior. This culture needs to die.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by EJ on Friday October 01 2021, @02:11AM (3 children)
Telemetry is not always bad. For example, some games and applications have a crash reporter tool that pops up after a catastrophic failure to give you the option of sending the data to the developer.
If the thing just collected the data, then let you inspect all of the data before choosing to send it, there wouldn't be a problem for me. It would have to be something that doesn't nag me, and I have to go searching for outside of a crash.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01 2021, @06:06AM
Yep. Taking a look at a dump with all the correct symbols is brilliant. We had a couple Heisenbugs that we couldn't reproduce for years. So many unhelpful emails and reports. Finally, we got an email out of the blue with an attached minidump. It took a total 2 hours to fix it and to determine that all of those bugs were the same underlying bug rearing up its head differently.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday October 02 2021, @03:24AM (1 child)
Yes an option to upload a crash dump is sensible and fair. Tracking behavior like how often I run the application or, worse, (and this is not applicable to KDE to my knowledge) tracking all my mouse movements and how long I hover over each area of a window, is horrendous.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday October 02 2021, @03:28AM
Meh, ignore me. Freeman already said it [soylentnews.org] further up the thread.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @11:10PM
Yep, gentoo has a use flag for it: https://packages.gentoo.org/useflags/telemetry [gentoo.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01 2021, @08:52AM
M$ just hopped on the bandwagon. It was normalized by Google (Chrome, Android).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Friday October 01 2021, @09:28AM (2 children)
I checked what it's doing after seeing this "article" [soylentnews.org] and it already does all of that very well. Off by default, can't lock application features behind enabling it, is per-application, logs what it shares for each, has multiple levels of sharing, provides a bullet list of everything it shares at each level, and even has a button to show exactly what data it provides in JSON format at each level.
It's about as obtrusive as the existence of Debian's off-by-default "popularity contest" package ("popcon") and less personally identifying.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday October 02 2021, @11:44PM (1 child)
Thanks, that’s informative (but your post is already +5).
That’s the type of telemetry I’m ok with, however I do still want Linux free of this type of behaviour. Unless it makes Linux much better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Sunday October 03 2021, @02:19AM
If my karma weren't already at max I'd feel bad at the upmodding because I kind of spammed the same basic "no, that isn't what's going on, look here" comment to a bunch of people. Didn't expect moderation, just didn't want to repeat the same stuff to multiple people but figured you guys would want to some facts, so I had to reply to everyone individually since there's no way to tag multiple users in a single reply :/
Same here. I'm leaving it disabled because I disagree with telemetry in general, but I can see the value in what information it sends and appreciate the transparency of the implementation. Like I said in another comment, some people want to give something back to FOSS but can't give money and don't feel like they can do the necessary work, so if nothing else it might give them a way to provide information that's useful to the project.
KDE's implementation is a far cry from the "off means only slightly off" kind of telemetry bullshit you get with Windows 10 now, and is probably the best example of it I've seen. To be clear, though, I'm not specifically calling Microsoft out on this, because they're honestly no worse (and somewhat better in some ways) than a lot of the other big tech assholes cramming telemetry down our throats. Google started this trend of big tech companies being addicted to data and its profit potential, and its abuse is so commonplace now that even mentioning telemetry causes a backlash even when the developer does everything about it right.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday October 01 2021, @06:13PM
The Linux distro?
Or the desktop?
Or both?