Metrics and your privacy

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 09:40 -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On 11/23/06, James Wilkinson <fedora at aprilcottage.co.uk> wrote:
> > Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> > Mike: what *I'm* getting from this is two basic principles:
> >
> >  * "silent phone home" is Bad and Wrong. But users who use yum should
> >    expect that their computers will contact the Internet. This should be
> >    made more explicit.
> 
> No where have I ever even mentioned silent phone home, that was
> brought up on the list.

>From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Metrics:

<cite>
Phone Home
Phoning home is one of the most obvious methods for determining what >
installations are out there. The idea is simple, place an image in the
home page for Firefox, have yum contact a single site for its mirror
list (it already does), have Anaconda dial home during an install, have
a nightly cron job contact a central server, etc. 
</cite>

> Its not even mentioned in the RFC in the link
> I sent.  We're not interested in doing any trickery.  We're going to
> be as transparent about this as possible.

Well, what I read above doesn't necessarily match with what you write
here, or at least leaves a lot of room for nit-picking: As I read it,
you are proposing to trick users by trapping them into a default firefox
URL.

If you were transparent, you'd instead set the default "default url" to
a local file and let this contain a "count me" button, directing to a
@redhat.com address, or not do so at all.

BTW: AFAIS, there is another similar "silent trickery" lurking in
firefox: Its "check for updates" feature seems to be enabled by default,
which causes it to "silently phone home" to mozilla.org.

Ralf