[kde-community] user stats for Neon

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 14 April 2016 at 15:16, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
> 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.

++1 for any such stats to serve users better. They do understand the
concept as it's used widely.

If this is interesting for you:
What I do in-app (Kexi - https://blogs.kde.org/2013/12/09/usage-stats)
when users agree is: generating an UID to track unique uses (including
full reinstalls as long as the $HOME dir stays.
This helps to avoid dynamic IP problems. I did not find IPs so useful.


> Jonathan
> _______________________________________________
> kde-community mailing list
> kde-community at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community



-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

KDE:
: A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators
: and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org
Calligra Suite:
: A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org
Kexi:
: A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi
Qt Certified Specialist:
: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek