What do you think of telemetry?

Privacy Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’d like to know what you think about telemetry (in open source and privacy friendly software of course) and if it’s so “bad” in terms of privacy to enable it.

I’ve got into the habit of automatically disabling everything, but I wonder if enabling it for certain services only would be more beneficial to me in helping the team come up with even better products.

Proton, Tuta, Mozilla (Firefox), Bitwarden, several Linux distributions etc. offer telemetry activation and are recognized and recommended by the whole community for their respect of privacy.

What do you think?

2 Likes
2

I think telemetry in and of itself isn’t bad. It is useful for developers to know what devices their app is used on, what version of an operating system and what features users of an app use, among other things. However, it can be used to collect a lot more information than just what is necessary.

Brave removed (or is removing, not sure if it has happened yet) the ‘Strict’ fingerprinting protection. One reason they said is because very few users used it, but the users who knew about it and enabled it probably also disabled telemetry. This means the actual percentage of users is probably much higher, skewing the results.

I do believe that telemetry should be an option to turn on (or off if on by default as long as the user is showed the option to disable it upon starting the app/device for the first time) as long as it isn’t privacy-invasive.

7 Likes
3

There is always a risk that personal data ends up in telemetry or logging by accident. Given the massive amounts of data that basically everyone is collecting it is very hard to do data leakage prevention of that.

If you care about privacy protections you should always reduce your fingerprint. It’s why we use aliases too. Minimizing the potential of leaked data. A big part in that is al reducing and refusing giving data. The less places your data is or could be the better. That’s why I block all telemetry, analytics, logging, etc etc.

3 Likes
4

I support telemetry in FOSS projects and always keep it on when I’m asked. In commercial programs it is, of course, always turned off

1 Like
5

Regardless FOSS or proprietary, always turn telemetry OFF. Telemetry is EVIL, its gathered and later (once it reaches some 1m+ records) sold with huge profit.

I personally dont use software without ability to turn off/disable telemetry. My data is really mine and hands off it! Pretty simple really.

6

I agree with @BlindedByRage404 and @crossroads

I will love to see projects that implement transparent telemetry. Even in apps where it is opt-out, they don’t give you transparency on what’s shared. Transparent telemetry will put all the to-be sent data in a folder, and let you review it (human-readable format) and choose what you want to sent and what your refuse to sent.

2 Likes
7

I have a problem with telemetry because anytime I hear about it, it’s almost always an instance where it was opt-out and forcing the data collection on unsuspecting users.

Have no qualms with opt-in telemetry but very rare will you come across software that actually give you this choice so in general I dislike telemetry and will go out of my way to avoid it.

1 Like
8

I disable as much as possible when using non-FOSS software. FOSS tends to be opt-in. I opt in if i feel that the telemetry is reasonable and that the project is both very trustworthy and very important to my computer usage. For example, i would opt into telemetry for whatever linux distro i use at the time.

9

I really don’t check all FOSS programs I use, but KDE is one I opted-in for telemetry (you get asked on first start, can change it later)

Summary

Screenshot_20240414_072458

And here’s a part of log stored in directory ~/.local/share/plasmashell/kuserfeedback/audit/

Summary 
{
    "applicationVersion": {
        "data": {
            "value": "5.27.10"
        },
        "description": "The version of the application.",
        "telemetryMode": "BasicSystemInformation"
    },
    "compiler": {
        "data": {
            "type": "GCC",
            "version": "11.4"
        },
        "description": "The compiler used to build this application.",
        "telemetryMode": "BasicSystemInformation"
    },
    "opengl": {
        "data": {
            "glslVersion": "4.60",
            "profile": "compat",
            "renderer": "AMD Radeon RX 6600",
            "type": "GL",
            "vendor": "AMD",
            "vendorVersion": "Mesa 24.0.3-0tux2",
            "version": "4.6"
        },
        "description": "Information about type, version and vendor of the OpenGL stack.",
        "telemetryMode": "DetailedSystemInformation"
    },
    "panelCount": {
        "data": {
            "panelCount": 2
        },
        "description": "Counts the panels",
        "telemetryMode": "DetailedSystemInformation"
10

So on KDE the green bar allows you to personalize the level of telemetry ?

11

Exactly, from off up to 4 additional levels of information (system and usage)

3 Likes