Re: F40 Change: Privacy-preserving Telemetry for Fedora Workstation (System-Wide)

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On Thu, Jul 06, 2023 at 05:10:24PM +0100, Aoife Moloney wrote:
> == Summary ==
> 
> The Red Hat Display Systems Team (which develops the desktop) proposes
> to enable limited data collection of anonymous Fedora Workstation
> usage metrics.

One thing to realize here is that, no matter what collection method will be
used and how well it will be secured against potential malicious actors, the
reputation of Fedora *will* be harmed or at least tainted.  And it won't be
easy to undo that.

Even if we end up using mathematically sound techniques as per Differential
Privacy (as I suggested in my other reply), most user won't know/realize that
and will only see the words "telemetry" and "Fedora" alongside each other in
all those discussions and articles that will inevitably pop up as a result of
this change.

I think the reputation of Fedora as a project shouldn't be taken lightly,
regardless of the actual implementation, and should be weighted against the
benefits that it would bring to the project.  I'd say a huge portion of the
user base in Fedora consists of technical people who actively despise the
notion of any kind of "phone home" mechanism on their system (me included), and
for good reason.  It's also evidenced by this thread so far.

The problem, as noted in this thread multiple times, is that if we make this
opt-in, the usefulness would decrease to almost it being irrelevant.  If we
make it opt-out, all the above applies (IMHO).

Consider that even those big software companies couldn't prevent their products
from getting the bad reputation, despite some of them reportedly using
Differential Privacy (!).

-- 
Michal Domonkos / RPM dev team / Red Hat, Inc.
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