Red Hat's system development team is considering starting work indicator data telemetry by default starting from Fedora Workstation 40, and claims that collecting user work indicator data can be used to further optimize Fedora Workstation and make the user experience better .
According to Aoife Moloney, a developer on the Red Hat community and engineering team, the privacy-preserving telemetry implemented in Fedora Workstation 40 is not designed to collect personal user data, but rather interested in workstation usage metrics data.
We believe that the open source community can ethically collect limited data about how its software is used without involving big data companies or building creepy tracking profiles that don't serve users' interests.
Before any data is sent for the first time, users can choose to disable data uploads. Our data collection services will run on Fedora infrastructure and will not rely on Google Analytics or any other controversial third-party services.
In contrast to proprietary software operating systems, users can redirect data collection to their own private metrics server instead of Fedora's to see exactly what data Red Hat is collecting from you, since the server components that implement telemetry are also open source .
The implication is that Fedora Workstation collects user system indicators to better optimize the experience, and the process and indicators of data collection are open and transparent, and will not be used for evil.
The proposal is currently published and publicly discussed on the Fedora development list, where the kind of data collected is explained in more detail:
- We would like to know which IDEs are most popular among users and which runtimes are used to create containers with Toolbx.
- We want to collect the click-through rate of the recommended software banners in GNOME Software to evaluate which banners are really useful for users.
- We also want to know how often the panels in gnome-control-center are accessed to determine which panels can be merged or removed, as we also want to add other settings, but research shows that the current large number of settings panels has made it difficult for users to find commonly used setting.
- We also want to collect hardware information such as the laptop model ID which is useful for working with hardware vendors such as Lenovo.
This proposal has been opposed by many users and developers, especially the fact that data telemetry is "enabled by default" , which makes many users feel that Red Hat has forgotten the original intention of the open source concept of "protecting privacy". In addition, according to European privacy protection regulations, there must be a clear notice before collecting user data, and users are allowed to make different choices. Fedora Workstation has a high probability of being sued for enabling data telemetry by default.
A more detailed discussion can be found in this Fedora developer thread , and the proposal still needs to be evaluated by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) before it can be formally approved.