On telemetry

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How many times have you heard this line? How many times did you actually upfront, before talking to a representative, decide to answer "yes, I'll provide you with my feedback!"? Chances are slim to none.

Privacy still matters

I didn't have internet at home until I was about 23 years old. There's virtually no traces of my existence aside from a few mentions before web 2.0. But that changed things in a drastic way. And for consumers and users, not in a good way.

We ran into significant public push back when we introduced telemetrics-client, a piece of software we designed to allow Clear Linux OS developers to receive anonymized system data. Mostly this contained the sort of thing that abrt also reports: crashes, errors, kernel OOPS data. We ran the data through an ingest system that scrubbed the origin IP addresses and sanitized it in a way that we no longer could identify the origin, unless you specifically marked the data with a personal stamp. Not something you could do by accident. I ran Clear on like 6+ systems, each of them had their own stamp. I knew exactly what bugs were happening on all my systems because of the stamp.

But despite having privacy experts telling us we built a really good system that handled the user data in a good way protecting end users, the users still hated it. Even if it was turned off by default, and opt-in only. The fact that it was there was enough for people to tell us they were concerned that at some point it silently might get turned on and no user would have been told that it was.

So, no telemetry here.

I don't particularly like abrt either. Most of my experiences with it have been negative. It's certainly caused me to be overly averse to good systems like it. Most of the time, these systems largely overvalue the data they send, and it takes one hell of a team to dissect it and produce meaningful results out of it that catch early bugs, and hard to catch ones.

I think I'm more of a fan of the testing we had in place. Ultimately this is where the real value lives for a good CI/CD pipeline. Once your users get crashes, you're already in the weeds, and you will have lost a customer/user or worse, someone who previously advocated for your project.

So probably, never?

Yeah, I don't think right now I would want to even start collecting this sort of data. I have no appetite for it. I'm in no shape to bring in privacy experts and lawyers, either. Let's keep those people at bay a little more. Who knows what to do with thousands of event data bits per hour. I certainly don't. And I don't want to.

I do need to setup bug trackers, a mailing list. But for the time being, please find me on IRC or discord?

If something wasn't right, tell us. If everything was alright, tell everyone.

Please stay on the line for an opportunity to click

--sofar (aka Auke)