Red Hat-proposed Fedora opt-out Telemetry is opposed by 74%. Red Hat is deeply involved despite naysayers.
Red Hat-proposed Fedora opt-out Telemetry is opposed by 74%. Red Hat is deeply involved despite naysayers.
This poll uses @cassidyjames’s suggestions for opt-in/opt-out terminology. I’m keeping Cassidy’s definitions and removing some of the commentary — see the link for details. Please note that no one is suggesting or considering a “buried opt-out” approach here. That option is just here to be complete....
This poll is a bit hard to understand but essentially you could vote for multiple options, the highest opt-out option is at 26%, meaning 74% of people oppose this idea.
The original proposal is at 16%, for a jarring 84% disapproval rate.
Despite overwhelming negative feedback, Red Hat is currently drafting a revised proposal.
But what about Red Hat?
This is the link to the proposal: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Telemetry#Privacy-preserving_Telemetry_for_Fedora_Workstation
These parts are all interesting and contradict some people who argue Red Hat has no hand in this issue:
Name: Michael Catanzaro Email: <mcatanzaro@redhat.com>
and
The Red Hat Display Systems Team (which develops the desktop) proposes to enable limited data collection of anonymous Fedora Workstation usage metrics.
and
It is Fedora Legal's obligation to ensure our data collection complies with legal requirements in the jurisdictions in which Red Hat operates
and
Occasionally, Red Hat might need to collect specific metrics to justify additional time spent on contributing to Fedora or additional investment in Fedora.
The quotes above were handpicked. There are 7 matches for "Red Hat" in the link above, not counting the email address.
See, the thing that pisses me off and is the reason why I moved away from Fedora (Silverblue) about a week ago is that Fedora is the base of RHEL. Future RHEL's will be based off Fedora. The community therefor is providing free development for their pricey enterprise solution.
Now they're adding insult to injury by wanting to enable telemetry metrics on the by default, claiming that the user has to opt in to report anything, but the fact is that the ordinary user might be paying that much attention. Sometime after the EULA might change and all that tasty dara will probably be harvested.
This is the threat of it. The Fedora community has been one of the best, if not the best Linux distribution community out there. Now RedHat/IBM is sowing the seeds of distrust and will in all likelihood transform Fedora into a husk of its former self, much like Cannonical did to Ubuntu.
It's becoming such a drag to see that these corporate entities are turning tail and taking their community projects in the same direction as Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Anonymized telemetry doesn't hurt my feelings as long as it's opt in. Unfortunately, fedora's link to Rhel which has repeatedly kicked the community in the ribs worries me. Red hat may decide that fedora should collect by default in an update or that features will only be decided by telemetry instead of user request or developer interest.
Basically, Red Hat/IBM is my worry when it comes to this. No proof of anything at this point but I no longer have any faith in Red Hat.