this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
50 points (83.8% liked)

Linux

48209 readers
710 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Many people are get furious about telemetry in firefox or distros, but when i ask what their precise issue is with it, can give no answer.

They already gave you their answer. They don't think collecting data without very deliberate opt in is acceptable. There is no need for anything more precise than that. It's a perfectly complete answer on its own.

[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

Personally, i see metric/telemetry collection like democracy; you are perfectly entitled to not participate, but if you opt out you also forfeit your right to complain about bugs or missing features.

I work on a companion app for a piece of very expensive hardware where our users are trained on how to report problems, and I'd still have 1 stack trace from our telemetry system than 1000 user reports. Our privacy policy explicitly states that we collect some information for the purpose of identifying and fixing issues, and for product development, and that we won't sell or share that data. We operate in the EU, so the amount of money we could get from a data broker selling that information would be a rounding error on the fines we'd see if we did.

Absolutely read the privacy policy and call out weak policies, but "metrics" and "telemetry" are not synonyms for "spying"