[kde-community] user stats for Neon

[Martin Graesslin]

On Thursday, April 14, 2016 2:16:03 PM CEST Jonathan Riddell 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 think the very minimum is to inform the user about. That can also be on the 
download page where one downloads the iso. If the user knows about it and 
doesn't like it, he can just decide to not install, leave an angry message in 
forums and we get then also feedback :-P

Joke aside: I wanted to have a "privacy center" integrated in systemsettings 
for quite some time [1]. That's a thing which could go there.

Cheers
Martin

[1] We have the awesome location service which we don't properly use as we 
need users to acknowledge the privacy bits.
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