[News] Canonical wants Ubuntu to collect your personal data

[StyM]

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/45620-c...-personal-data

Canonical is planning to make a change to Ubuntu which would mean that the Linux distro would collect information - or telemetry data - on desktop PCs during installation and afterwards.

This has gone down like a bucket of cold sick with Linux users. After all, this is the sort of thing that Microsoft does and is precisely the sort of thing that they hate about Windows 10.

Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, explained that this is happening because the company wants to work on the elements that matter most to Ubuntu users, and the data collected will help the firm decide what to focus on in the future.

That data will include the version of Ubuntu being installed, basic spec of the PC ? CPU family, memory, disk size, GPU, display resolution, manufacturer ? along with details of the third-party software selected, and time taken for the installation, among other information.

The OS will also gather data on location, although this will merely be the location selected by the user during installation ? no IP address information will be collected. In other words, the data collected will be anonymised, and transferred via HTTPS for obvious security reasons.

[xlink]

So basically what they COULD have gotten based on viewership of their website (viewer agent) plus applications installed.

I'll still avoid this if I can for any personal desktops, but it doesn't sound too bad and likely doesn't matter for servers or public machines.