Re: Telemetry, opt-in,opt-out [was: Proposal: new default bindings for winner and windmove]

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:

>>Whatever "industry standard" means. Industry standard is
>>surveillance capitalism these days. Not something to strive
>>for, not in free software's context, I think.
>
> Nothing to do with free software. A free program that collects
> anonymized usage metrics is still free. The simple fact is that the
> more you learn about your users's preferences, the better you can
> satisfy their desires. As long as users can opt out, I see no moral
> quandary whatsoever, especially if the program explicitly asks the
> user about anonymized data collection on first startup.

This might not be spelled out in the GNU GPL, but it is definitely an
issue that has concerned the Free Software movement.

You might not care strongly about this, but other people do.  We should
respect those users, and thus make any type of metrics opt-in.  IMO,
Debian's popcon gets this right: it's opt-in, and the statistics can be
reasonably anonymized by sending them over Tor.

If anyone wants to work on something like this, please be aware that
this is very likely going to be the bare minimum for us to be able to
accept it.  Thanks.