SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday October 01 2021, @09:17AM (1 child)
"this path", as defined by this bullshit pretending to be an article, doesn't even exist. I don't want to duplicate the entire wall of text again, but refer to my reply to an AC farther down [soylentnews.org] for an explanation of what it's doing and how. TL;DR: any telemetry is off by default, has multiple levels of data reporting, adheres to KDE's (sane and user-friendly) policies on data collection, and makes it very clear what you send if you choose to send something. You can see the JSON data before it ever gets sent and it even keeps a log of what it's sent and when.
The sensationalist attitude of the article should have been a red flag to everybody reading it, along with ludicrous claims like saying that KDE's dumping data right into $HOME/telemetry (who the fuck does that? Most everyone in FOSS follows XDG spec and uses .local and .config since like the past ten years, or at worst still uses ~/.foo).
But apparently people prefer to get mad first and ask questions never.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01 2021, @05:50PM
lots of glorified Windows users use Linox now.