 Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk on the internet about how GNOME is going to be spying on everyone who uses their desktop environment. And I wanted to take a few minutes here today to talk about what is actually happening, what they're actually collecting, and the entire program that GNOME has instituted here. Because there's a lot of misinformation out there, and I think it's imperative when we come across these situations to know the truth. And a lot of times when this kind of stuff happens in the open source and Linux community, there is this idea that any telemetry is bad. Like seriously bad, it's the root of all evil. And I can see where that comes from because a lot of us are former Windows users and the telemetry that Windows collects is unknown to us. We don't know what they're actually taking from our computers because it's not open source, it's about as proprietary as you can get. Even if you turn off all the telemetry, there's still no clue whether or not Microsoft has actually turned that stuff off and is just taking it in the background without you really knowing it, or if there's not other stuff that just can't be turned off at all. So there's this whole unknown aspect to telemetry that gives it a really seriously bad name. And also, a lot of times telemetry is opt out, meaning that it's turned on by default. And that also leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths, it's just not something that people are all that interested in because they don't want that stuff on by default. Luckily, most of the time when open source projects ask for telemetry, it is opt in, meaning that it's off by default and you have to volunteer to give that information. That's usually the way it's done. Now, there obviously have been exceptions, we're looking at Uodacity. And those projects have been suitably chastised for turning that stuff on by default. Whether or not they actually did anything about it or not is another question entirely. So let's talk about the meat and potatoes of what GNOME has done. Basically what they've done is created a CLI tool that you can install on your computer. Again, note that this is important, that you have to install it yourself that will send anonymized information from your system back to GNOME servers. That's all it is. So the most important thing to notice here, as I said, is that you have to install it and you have to volunteer to give the information. So to answer the overarching question, is GNOME going to be spying on you? No. Of course not. You are going to have to download this application, volunteer the information that will be sent back to GNOME servers. It's all something that you would have to do. So the next question then becomes is if you do opt in, what are they going to be sending? So if we take a look at the GitHub page for the CLI tool, this is the stuff that they're going to be sending. Distribution version and variant, hardware, so this is going to probably include things like CPU and GPU and stuff. Whether or not Flatpak is going to be installed, whether or not FlatHub is enabled, what applications you have installed, favorite applications. Those are the icons you have in the dashboard, the type of online accounts you have set up, whether or not you have sharing enabled, how many workspaces you use, whether or not you use dynamic or static workspaces, the number of users on the system, what your default browser is, what GNOME extensions you have, and then they're going to have a salted hash of the machine ID and username. Out of all that stuff, this part is the one that worried me, would worry me the most because it does actually have something that is personally identifiable to you, but it is hashed, so it should be fine. Basically if anybody were to get access to that information they wouldn't be able to do anything with it anyways. So out of all this stuff, there's nothing here that is truly horrifying and again you have to opt in for any of this information to be sent. So it's not that big of a deal. The blog posts and the Twitter rantings that I've seen over the last couple days have not been very full of factful information, let's just put it that way. They saw that GNOME has created a telemetry tool and have taken that to mean that they're going to be spying on you and that is just absolutely not the case. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is even further away than something like KDE. KDE includes the tool for telemetry out of the box. It's not on obviously, you have to enable it, but it is installed by default. I know that Ubuntu itself has a telemetry tool built in. You have to bypass that question when you install Ubuntu. So GNOME is not anywhere near the first project to do this and they've done it in such a way where you have to explicitly install the tool that collects the information. And that means that you're volunteering to send information that they do collect. Now, the real question is, will this tool eventually be included in versions of GNOME? And I don't think so. The reason why I say that is because GNOME is not a desktop distribution. It is a desktop environment, which means that the distributions are very much in control over what is included when GNOME ships. So for example, when you download Ubuntu, which uses GNOME, you're going to get a different set of applications than you will if you install Fedora, which also uses GNOME. There are going to be different versions, different applications are going to be included and not included things like that. So I don't think that Ubuntu would ever include this tool out of the box. I just don't think that they ever would. Now, Fedora maybe because they're much more tightly knit with GNOME than Ubuntu is, it's possible this tool will eventually be included in Fedora. But again, I would never see it being turned on by default. It would be something that you'd have to enable. And I'm guessing even then more likely than not, this is going to stay a tool that you have to download and then enable on your own. So that leads me to the final point of this video. And I want to talk a little bit about telemetry itself, because like I said at the beginning, there is this idea that all telemetry is bad, that if they're collecting information on you, even if it's anonymized, it's not good for anybody. It's just not a good thing to have. And I don't think that I agree with that. And the reason why is because we want good software, right? I think that we can all agree that we want excellent software that meets as many people's needs as possible. And that's especially true when you're talking about these huge projects, things like GNOME and KDE and every Linux distribution. We want those things to be really good and to be as all-encompassing towards our needs as possible. It's really hard for a developer to meet that desire when they don't know anything about what their users want. And there are obviously other ways to get that kind of information. They can do surveys and stuff like that. But people very rarely will take a survey. And unless there's some kind of reward attached to the end of it. So surveys don't really work. So the telemetry data allows them to see what is getting used the most and whether or not they should put development resources into those things. So, for example, let's just say they put in a new feature into Ubuntu and nobody used it. They would then be able to have that information that nobody's using this thing. They can stop developing it and then move on to something different. At least theoretically, right? So I don't think that you can say that telemetry is almost always bad because I don't think that that's true. I think that if it's perfectly anonymized or it's anonymized as you can get and it's well stored so it's not easily accessible by someone who could do malicious damage with that information. I don't think that it is a bad thing all the time. Now, obviously, that entire argument is predicated on it being opt-in. As long as it's voluntary, I have absolutely no problem with telemetry whatsoever. I just really, really don't. In fact, I'm in favor of it oftentimes because it does lead eventually to better software for me and for everybody else. It's just kind of the way it works. Now, if they were to take that data and do absolutely nothing with it, then why bother? Just don't take any of my information. But as long as they're putting it to good use, I don't have a problem contributing that again, but it has to be me contributing it. It has to be voluntary. It's when it's opt-out or there's no way to turn it off that it becomes a big problem, right? And for the most part, we don't see that situation in open source projects. It does happen from time to time, but for the most part, it's always opt-in. And I think that that is the way it should be. So those are my thoughts on the GNOME situation and on telemetry in general. If you have thoughts on telemetry or the GNOME situation, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast, just like all these fine people. If you wanna support me a year in advance, you can save 10% over on Patreon. So that'd be awesome. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all amazing people. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am that you guys support me. The channel would not be where it is without you. So thank you so very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see ya next time.