[kde-community] user stats for Neon

[Jonathan Riddell]

A while ago Albert gave a talk at Akademy about collecting some data
on our users.  This got me thinking and with Neon I wanted to see how
many installs we had.  Our package install software will check for new
versions being available and I could count the IPs of this check but
that's very unreliable.  Canonical counts IPs from the NTP ping at
boot up but of course it's only useful at best as a relative metric of
numbers of installs not absolute numbers.  So I added a machine-id to
the URL it checks which is the unique value set at install time by
systemd (/etc/machine-id) so now it has a good idea of being able to
count the number of installs.

But KDE cares about privacy and it's in our Vision and I don't want to
be accused of violating that.  But currently I can't see how this can
violate users privacy any more than an IP address can so I'm curious
to hear what arguments might come up against this.

Jonathan