Telemetry settings: Allow user to review a sample of the data being sent before sending it

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

I was about to reply to the thread Jacob just started, but then just did 
not want to hijack it. :)

First off I like to applaud the KDE community for the approach chosen 
about telemetry. It is really with the user's privacy in mind with opt-in 
and thus no data being sent by default. That helped me to agree to the 
minimal level of data being sent for Plasma and I think some applications 
where I found that setting.

Kudos for this truly non intrusive approach. I get that you risk receiving 
a lot less data than with choosing an opt-out approach. But I applaud you 
on how you put your user's first with that approach. It builds trust.


I can review what has been sent *after* it has been sent. Even for every 
occurrence of sending the data which is awesome! Please keep that level of 
transparency.

What I would like to have is to review a sample of data *before* I agree 
to sending it. A button I can click to make it gather the data it would 
send without sending it. Then I can see exactly how the data looks in 
detail. It might give me and others confidence to agree to a higher level. 
Especially if I can see exactly that for example the data that would be 
send while containing some unique ID – a pseudonym – does not contain my 
name or some other identifier that could be easily traced back to my 
identity – unless that unique ID would be gathered from my machine's data 
by some data breach onto infrastructure I use for storing it and for 
backups. Especially with usage data like count of starts and usage time 
for applications and so on, cause there is some risk that in case of a 
data breach someone might feed this to some AI for analysis of behavioral 
data. While I trust you to never do any of that without user's explicit 
permission… there is always a more than 0% risk of a data breach no matter 
how good the security measures are.

I see the general list of what data is to be sent that changes with 
adjusting slider position seems to be quite detailed. But I bet actually 
being able to review a sample of the data taken from the user's machine at 
the point of clicking that button might help users to determine whether to 
agree to the level they selected.

Especially as given the repeated and on purpose boundary violations of 
data gathering by large public cloud providers too big to fail (for now at 
least) might have made users who are aware of those tendencies probably a 
bit over-cautious about what level of information gathering to agree to. 
Actually being able to review the exact data structure to be sent right 
within the settings page for the telemetry settings by opening a text 
viewer with a sample of the data gives an additional sense of control on 
what would happen on agreement¹.


I am willing to review the bug tracker whether such an request has been 
reported there so far and if not do a report there.

Thanks again for putting users first. I truly appreciate it and it is a 
reason for me to use Plasma!

Awesome work!


[1] Of course in the end one would have to review whether the installed 
binary matches the source code and whether that source code does what it 
tells the user it would. I trust you and Debian developers on that :)

Best,
-- 
Martin