Metrics and your privacy

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Wed Nov 22 17:01:42 UTC 2006


Mike McGrath wrote:

> I think you guys are focusing too much on semantics.  Yum, updates,
> checking for updates, caching, blah.  What we're talking about is a
> phone home mechanism that can easily be disabled at install time.

Capturing that information by the existing traffic with Fedora mirrors 
is a neat solution that gives you ongoing stats using information that 
all users of the mirrors are content to let out already.

> What if it anonymously (not secretly) sent a hardware profile that we
> could then use to better support your hardware?

I would be okay with all of it.

If the guy opts in to the hardware stuff, you can just populated the 
HTTP request with a small amount of tokens as a browser does

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

Well you already know the Fedora version and have a chance to infer the 
arch from the path.  So eg,

"512M i810 Dell 1600x1200 ..."

But I don't know why you think it is a clientside UI project.  On the 
client, this doesn't have to be a feature at all, it can completely 
disappear in the existing communication with the mirror, which the guy 
initiates.

-Andy "the blah"




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