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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, Informative) by Marand on Saturday October 02 2021, @05:31AM

    by Marand (1081) on Saturday October 02 2021, @05:31AM (#1183568) Journal

    They obviously want the full data, otherwise they wouldn't have spent time coding options to enable its collection.

    Sure, but wanting something if you're willing to give it doesn't mean you only want that and don't get value from anything else. I want someone to give me a billion dollars, but I wouldn't scoff at somebody handing me $100. The idea here is that anything you offer helps them, so share only what you're comfortable with, including nothing. They don't even ask you about it at launch or anything, it's just tucked away in the settings, waiting to be enabled if you choose to. In fact, it's so unobtrusive that I literally had no idea it existed until I started fact-checking this article, because I haven't looked in the settings of any of the relevant applications in a while and they did nothing to even indicate the existence of this new feedback feature. It just sits there waiting in case you want to use it.

    To look at it another way, a lot of people use FOSS software and would like to give back, but don't feel qualified to contribute in the normal ways. These kinds of reporting options are presented in a way that lets them do something for a project without putting any pressure on anybody, without being obtrusive or invasive to others.

    Also, it doesn't even seem to be the kind of data that leads to bad telemetry-based decision making. Everything I checked just had basic stuff like "how many displays are you using? Do you use this program often? What version and OS are you using?" kind of metrics. That stuff is legitimately useful as a gauge of things like how much focus you should spend on high-DPI or multi-monitor worflows, whether you have enough users on 720p-ish resolutions to be concerned about dialogues being too large by default, and how long you should be willing to support older versions of software. If you have a disproportionately large number of users on Debian stable, you're going to want to keep that in mind when dealing with bug reports and backporting fixes, for example.

    I remember back when M$ used to ask whether you wanted to share details of your "setup experiences". Look at them now.

    Slippery slope fallacy. Just because it's possible to go from A to B doesn't mean that's the only possibility, and the fact that KDE itself built this feature with end-user privacy and choice in mind from the start is a good sign that it won't happen that way just because someone else with completely different motives went that route. Rather than judging their actions based on those of a completely unrelated entity, we should be judging them based on what they did and their own track record in the past. There's no reason to be assuming the worst here when they've done nothing even slightly bad with it so far.

    If anything, the way they've done it helps give some measure of trust to the process. If an application is using the official KUserFeedback mechanism you have a reasonable idea of what's going to happen because it all works the same and falls under the same standards. Any KDE application that chooses to not use it and instead provide its own appears shady in comparison, because it indicates they want extra data and less oversight with how it can be used.

    Also, it's been done in a way that should make it fairly easy to do an LD override with a stub library if you really want to get rid of it. They aren't hiding it or doing anything remotely like forcing it on people here.

    If it starts becoming more forceful, then that is the time to start fighting back, but until then it's about as harmless as it can get.

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