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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: 3, Interesting) by loonycyborg on Friday October 01 2021, @11:39AM (1 child)

    by loonycyborg (6905) on Friday October 01 2021, @11:39AM (#1183337)

    "Telemetry" is inherently a bad idea. They will be limited by exact types of information they're gathering and very often misinterpret statistical data. The weak spot of any sort of large scale opinion poll or the like is the fact that participants don't get to choose the questions thus results might get skewed by originator's biases(both due to choice and wording of questions and cherry-picked interpretations) turning entire thing into one huge tautology. The same applies to software telemetry. I think significantly better tool for software makers is to monitor how people talk about the software on public forums. At least such data comes based on people's own initiative thus is unlikely to miss what people really care about.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday October 02 2021, @01:22AM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Saturday October 02 2021, @01:22AM (#1183525)

    But that data is still subject to self-selection bias [sagepub.com]. The people quiet/shy/beaten-down-because-of-their-incomplete-questions enough to not be posting on fora won't be represented.

    Sure you can misinterpret statistical data, but at least you have something to misinterpret (and start targeting your efforts towards removing technical debt [slashdot.org]) in areas where at least some people are using your code. Better that than nothing.