Ubuntu Wants to Collect Data About Your System
Now, I know this should not be reason for panic or paranoia, but USUALLY bad things started this way, "for the benefit of users". This is just a benign start.
(Look what happen to F-35)
There are a lots of people who defend this Ubuntu move: "It is optional", "It is for improvement", "Those are only software-hardware infos", "All collected data is transparent"... And, from last line of quoted text, there are people who are excited! Geee... he/she really don't need much to be excited!
From exploring this theme through texts and Youtube comments, there is some percentage of users saying: "I'm going to switch to Debian, (or this or that) ..."
Is there a new wave of Ubuntu refugees on sight? Personally, I abandoned that wagon long time ago when Gnome3 and Unity was launched.
Canonical chose today to tell the Ubuntu community of its plans to include a data collection tool in the Ubuntu 18.04 installer.
“We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it,”
Since few (if any) users would choose to opt-in to share this sort of data, Canonical is making participation in the scheme entirely opt-out.
That means, unless you choose otherwise, Ubuntu 18.04 will automatically compile data about your system and send it back to the cheerful chaps and chapesses at Canonical HQ in order “help improve Ubuntu”.
‘Anyone who doesn’t want to share data with Ubuntu can quickly opt-out before install’
Beyond collecting some install-time data Canonical also says it wants to enable two other services to collect other data as you use your system:
Ubuntu Popcon - to track the relative popularity of apps, packages and so on
Apport - to automatically send anonymous crash reports
Canonical says it will make the results of the data it gathers public.
Anyone with a curious eye or of a nosey persuasion (i.e. bloggers like me) will be able to go online and see the overall percentage and spread of Ubuntu installs across the world, the hardware Ubuntu runs on, the amount of RAM users have, the apps they use the most, and so on.
And that excites me greatly!
Now, I know this should not be reason for panic or paranoia, but USUALLY bad things started this way, "for the benefit of users". This is just a benign start.
(Look what happen to F-35)
There are a lots of people who defend this Ubuntu move: "It is optional", "It is for improvement", "Those are only software-hardware infos", "All collected data is transparent"... And, from last line of quoted text, there are people who are excited! Geee... he/she really don't need much to be excited!
From exploring this theme through texts and Youtube comments, there is some percentage of users saying: "I'm going to switch to Debian, (or this or that) ..."
Is there a new wave of Ubuntu refugees on sight? Personally, I abandoned that wagon long time ago when Gnome3 and Unity was launched.