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posted by martyb on Thursday September 30 2021, @09:32PM   Printer-friendly

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Friday October 01 2021, @09:28AM (2 children)

    by Marand (1081) on Friday October 01 2021, @09:28AM (#1183321) Journal

    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.

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by corey on Saturday October 02 2021, @11:44PM (1 child)

    by corey (2202) on Saturday October 02 2021, @11:44PM (#1183793)

    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

      by Marand (1081) on Sunday October 03 2021, @02:19AM (#1183809) Journal

      Thanks, that’s informative (but your post is already +5).

      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 :/

      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.

      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.