Fedora Workstation 40 considering the addition of privacy-preserving telemetry

In a recent announcement, the Fedora project disclosed a potential change proposal for Fedora 40, suggesting the addition of limited, opt-out telemetry to the workstation edition. The proposal, which is quite comprehensive, acknowledges the potential resistance from the community, given the sensitivity around user privacy.

Aoife Moloney, a member of the Red Hat Display Systems Team, clarified the intentions behind the proposal. “Fedora is an open source community project, and nobody is interested in violating user privacy. We do not want to collect data about individual users. We want to collect only aggregate usage metrics that are actually needed to achieve specific Fedora improvement objectives, and no more. We understand that if we violate our users' trust, then we won't have many users left, so if metrics collection is approved, we will need to be very careful to roll this out in a way that respects our users at all times. (For example, we should not collect users' search queries, because that would be creepy.)”, stated Moloney. The team is aware of the importance of user trust and plans to implement the change, if approved, in a way that respects users' privacy.

Moloney further emphasized that users will have the option to disable data upload before any data is sent for the first time. He also reminded the community that the proposal is just that—a proposal. It still needs to pass through community review and gain approval from the community-elected Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) before it can be implemented.

While telemetry can often be a tough sell, particularly in the open source community, it can provide developers with valuable anonymous usage data, assisting in the enhancement of software. The Fedora team's proposal reflects a careful balance between gathering useful data and respecting user privacy.