[kde-community] user stats for Neon

[Mirko Boehm - KDE]

Hi!

> On 14 Apr 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.

I believe that as long as we are transparent about it, this should be fine. Maybe, just maybe, there could be a way to turn it of for very privacy-sensitive users.

Cheers, 

Mirko.
-- 
Mirko Boehm | mirko at kde.org | KDE e.V.
FSFE Fellow, FSFE Team Germany
Qt Certified Specialist
Request a meeting: https://doodle.com/mirkoboehm