Andy Green wrote: > If there is a gratuitous connection action for statistic-collecting > purposes, it would be best to ask. But then you lose some information > from the people who for whatever reason said no. I think there is, and will remain to be, a large amount of suspicion about programs which contact sites on the Internet when this is not reasonably expected by their users. Fedora and Red Hat have a lot of goodwill in many quarters (especially on this list), but this will not be shared by users who are new to Linux. There may be situations where government or other organisations expect non-employees (e.g. students, people who need to interface with them) to use Fedora. [1] In this case, the rumour that the computer was spying on you could be damaging. > Whereas if you collect via yum mirrors, there is a transaction going on > initiated by the user that he benefits from. It seems hard for anyone > to object to your IP getting used for anonymous aggregated stats in > such a case, in fact if I visit any website I expect to have the same > done for my visit from their logs (esp if they are on Google > Analytics). Agreed. > It would be cool to generate a GUID per machine and attach it to yum > download URLs, eg, http://mirror.org/blah/thing.rpm?GUID=123-123-123.. > so it is ignored by the server but is present in the logs. But the logs > are still useful without it. I'm not sure how this would play with European data-privacy laws, especially in cases where one can tie an IP address to an individual. > 1. Machines that never update at all even once > > Making a new machine check for updates at least once as soon as it saw the > network was up would be a friendly and non-privacy threatening action that > would solve this... On a related subject -- may I propose that the standard Fedora web browser home page (which is common to l*nx, Firefox, Konqueror and other web browsers) as distributed in ISO images points users to the need to upgrade ("Welcome to Fedora. Please upgrade now! Here's how."), and that this is replaced > 3. Machines behind a local yum cache > > Whatever tools are provided to run the yum cache should have the repo > log processing stuff folded into them, and report stats up to Fedora HQ > by default. But a user should be able to turn it off. Again, you may need to inform the user that this was being done, since it would be a change of functionality where there had been an expectation of privacy. James. [1] For example, there are a number of computers on my company's network which are provided by shipping companies so we can enter details of shipments we are sending. I remain surprised that they chose Windows for this, and not a locked down Linux. -- E-mail: james@ | "WARNING: Letters may be used to construct words or aprilcottage.co.uk | phrases which some people may find objectionable" | -- Alphabet spaghetti disclaimer.
