[kde-community] user stats for Neon

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Donnerstag, 14. April 2016 15:26:10 CEST Mirko Boehm - KDE wrote:
> 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.

Any potentially privacy-sensitive information transfer should be opt-in, not 
opt-out.
I'd assume that the vast majority of users will allow it (given that it's not 
personally identifiable and they trust their distro), but opt-in puts you on 
the safe side.