I'm not sure what the big picture actually is, I don't think anyone does. Data mining is widespread admittedly. It's pretty difficult to avoid if you use the internet at all. I can understand wanting to minimise data collection, and I agree it's not necessarily a benevolent thing, but in this case I don't believe it is intentionally malign. Shuttleworth desperately wanted to make a success of Ubuntu and it has had a huge influence as a distro. I'm with Mrkvonic on this, if Canonical is to succeed we need to help rather than hinder its development. At one time Ubuntu was hardly breaking even and often making a loss. Shuttleworth explained his reasoning behind the decisions he's had to make to keep Ubuntu as a viable contemporary OS. By his own admission he's had to make decisions he knew would be controversial and derided. I think a lot of people need to mature and stop acting hysterically to any mention of data collection or business partnership. Ubuntu is freeware, it needs to be funded somehow. There really is no such thing as a free lunch. It's always the same with these sort of threads and encourages the tinfoil hat trolls to come out and play. I've been ridiculed for stating I trust Shuttleworth somewhat. He's an idealist and a visionary, and I admire that. He's always been honest about anything like this new data collection telemetry, and I just can't see it as being malefic. I would have preferred an opt-in, but after reading some of the replies on this thread I can see why Canonical have made this decision. Of course, the tinfoil brigade will label me as a Kool Aid drinking fanboy. I don't see why this always has to be an hierarchical binary oppositional argument. I'm fairly certain Canonical and Shuttleworth's intentions are good with this. If it improves Ubuntu it can't be bad.
@142395 I'm not going to debate about statistics and analytics.The interpretation of the collected data can give very different results. So I'm not going to debate about that. But I'll comment on your as you said is a contradicted sentence by itself. Either you trust someone or you don't. Trust with reservations does not exist. Saying that you trust them but.... equals with mistrust/distrust. "Giving someone a reasonable doubt" (is not trusting) and at least on this one we agree. The only difference is that from your point of view, you hope that "they won't use it for whatever reason"; my point of view is "if they really were not going to use it for whatever reason, they would not need to collect it in the first place"...
And you are not? Even if it is trumpeted on their main page the ridiculous Opt-out model is still forcing people to make the effort to do something to avoid feature creep that's not needful. They KNOW full well people are less likely to opt-out because at the least it takes extra time, often which people don't have. It's a no brainer. Opt-outs stink. Period. @pandlouk -
What about adding "intersectional" to the mix for more clarity? I hope Canonical doesn't hire anyone from Mozilla's marketing team.
@Daveski17 I really don't think you're doing your case any favours by refering to those with concerns in such a disparaging manner. Calling people immature, hysterical, tinfoil hat trolls etc is not helpful. These are legitimate concerns, as you said yourself data mining is prevalent. Policy creep is equally so. Really. Well Shuttleworth seems to think there is. Doesn't he intend to profit from those who contributed millions of hours of their time to a free open source community project called Linux? Aside from that, this data collection by Canonical has been presented as being for product improvement, now you are talking about it being a source of funding. That is how easily policy creep happens and how product improvement telemetry today, quietly morphs into data mining and privacy invasion tomorrow.
Second to RockLobster, I don't see how this argument is relevant to the data collection. The major part of income for them comes from support for Ubuntu Server, not Ubuntu desktop. And I highly doubt this actually increase the number of the desktop user who donate by comparable amount. Possibly you might mean cost cut? Anyway please stop using offensive or emotional words. Agreed. "If war is good or not" argument didn't yield any useful results. But "How war should be done" did to some extent. But I emphasize opt-in is incompatible with general analytics, at least for distros like Ubuntu.
Thx, that saves my time and we can concentrate on what is important. I believe partial trust is possible in various ways. I trust Google for their expertise in security research, but don't trust their privacy practice. I trust AirVPN for their technical expertise and good will, but do/can not 100% trust their no logging policy, just hoping it is true. The list goes on. Also current trust do not necessary mean permanent trust, but always what important is current. Ah, well, I remembered the word 'anything' shouldn't be used in affirmative sentence in English. I meant "they MIGHT use them (the info) for everything they want" and in my understanding it is equivalent to saying "they MIGHT use them for whatever reason", but correct me if I'm wrong. I (currently) trust that they collect only what they said and do not covertly betray opt-out (policy creep). Google have broken both of them more than once so no reason to trust Google. We can confirm these if one doubt by packet capture w/ Fiddler, but as I trust them I won't do that until something goes wrong. But we can't confirm what they do w/ those data in backend. Let's assume Canonical use the data only for their described purpose, but still there might be one malicious employee and he/she might try to abuse the data. However, I can't think of actual threat within those data collected. They seems to be minimal and not very usable for malicious purpose by itself. As reasonablePrivacy said, if it was Amazon they can link such data with real identity of you, but it's not, you don't sign in like MS account on Win10 or Google on Android. A difficult point is, if they're really mixed and used statistically. And even when the data itself don't include IP, the connection needs IP. In an extreme scenario they might even set special treatment for you and keep logging all your analytical data, but if what they collect is the same I don't see real threat and if they really want to abuse it they need to push specially crafted package for you which I think is very unlikely, and it is no more much relevant to analytics. No real threat do not mean no privacy problem, but that should be determined by each one's value so more of a personal decision. I keep to recommend Ubuntu for those Linux newbies but will explain these things when their reason to migrate (or dual use in most cases) is MS/Google/Apple's invasion. Diversity is good and also has been one of the core aspects of Linux. As sense of privacy differ in everyone, it should be allowed to exist a distribution which trade some privacy with usability and I'm sure analytics will enhance usability for real newbie.
It isn't relevant. I'm sorry, but who made you moderator? I wasn't the first to be condescending and I can retaliate to being trolled.
I was actually referring specifically to someone (albeit a tad obliquely) who was trolling me. I accept that data mining is worrying, as is policy creep. It's not that I embrace it, but I think in this case it probably is benign. A slightly similar thing happened with Maxthon and supposed surreptitious data collection, although Jeff Chen explained what really happened, many assumed he was being dishonest. I've no doubt Maxthon does data mine, but how much and whether it is for analysis or more nefarious purposes, depends on whether you accept Chen's explanation or not I suppose. Valid point, although he isn't short of a bob or two and has run Ubuntu at a loss/break even for a long time. After *Unity many think the Russian Space Agency didn't fire him far enough into space, but I think he is a bit of an idealist and possibly a bit ambitious for Ubuntu's future. I doubt he expected to make millions from Ubuntu right away, and as he's already wealthy, it seems more like a vanity project than anything else. Canonical/Ubuntu has contributed hugely to the popularity and usability of Linux, without it Linux would probably be in a very different place. Ubuntu is far from being a complete alternative to Windows or Mac yet, but I think it has the most potential of any of the distros. I wasn't referring to the data policy as being for funding, sorry if I didn't make that clear. I agree with your premise, and yes, we need to monitor any developments closely. As I stated earlier, I'm a bit concerned that this is an opt-out choice, but at the end of the day I honestly don't believe this telemetry is malign. *I really liked Unity lol. It persuaded me to buy a Lenovo laptop preinstalled with 14.04 LTS which I still run. It had problems (for me) on other hardware however and I think this is a big issue with hardware and Linux compatibility in general. I'm hoping this new Ubuntu telemetry can help ameliorate compatibility issues. Which may be one of the reasons Canonical are employing it.
OMG! Ubuntu has a new article about it: Ubuntu will let upgraders ‘opt-in’ to data collection in 18.04
Interesting. 'While some see the move to ferret data as one likely to yield Ubuntu developers valuable data on the sort of devices people use (and help them target engineering accordingly). Others find the decision to “opt-in” everyone en masse lest they spot a box to uncheck in the installer a little on the distasteful side.' ~ op cit
Does debian do the same thing.?.Im asking because i don`t know how many other distros do this and why ubuntu feel it needs to do this.
I personally begged as you happned to be the last one who used such words, sincere apology if it made you unpleasant. I don't want this thread to be locked like this.
Good, but the upgrade process will be one of the points where analytical data is most useful. But as all new install will be done in opt-out and they're planning "a tasteful way of asking [the opt in] question", the amount of data will gradually increase as time passes. They seems to be not too much hasty.
It doesn't mean that privacy-minded Wilders's Ubuntu users can't switch to Debian, provided there is a need. I don't think there is a need for it, because collected data are basic and there is easy way to opt-out. Nevertheless, it is quite similar distro (Ubuntu is Debian-based and imports a lot of packages from Debian testing/unstable) and works well as desktop distribution.
Debian on its own didn't do anything until Mark Shuttleworth came along. Its desktop presence is tiny. All of Linux, with its hundreds of distros has barely 1% desktop, and most of it is Ubuntu. The reason why anyone even thinks Linux + desktop is Ubuntu. Mrk
I don't care about desktop presence. Debian is usable. I don't think Ubuntu is that popular. There are other relatively popular and usable desktop Gnu/Linux distributions: Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Mint. Especially Mint and Fedora. Not to mention it is difficult to measure user popularity of distributions. Before Ubuntu there was Mandrake distribution which popularized Linux a lot, but got into problems after lost a court case over its name. Again, I don't care so much about popularity. I know some other Gnu/Linux distributions are as usable as Ubuntu. There is a choice. I do not think that this data collection is so serious that users should change distribution, but there is a choice.
There isn't really any choice. Can you use Linux as a production machine for work and/or things that other people need? The simple reality is no. I wish it was different, but when Canonical tried to do that, everyone jumped as if Mark Shuttleworth was selling Devil's sweat as baby tears. Now again. The paradox between people crying Google/Microsoft monopoly and then going paranoid about some data collection. No one out there has heard of Mandrake. Or even Ubuntu. Go outside and talk to random people. Mrk
Aren't Mint, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Gobuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Server Edition, Eeebuntu, Ubuntu Mini Remix, Crunchbang Linux, OzOs, OpenGEU, LXLE, Kylin and a plethora of others Ubuntu derivatives? As such, wouldn't they all benefit from useful telemetry gathered by Canonical, especially data to help with hardware compatibility?
Yes I think Debian is often overlooked as a desktop because of its traditional use as a server but it is also a good stable Desktop platform.
