Virtuous8897
When a proposal is made by a person, a political party, a company, or an entity of any type we automatically (consciously or not) run their proposal through our personal filters to create a judgment about said proposal. So, when Fedora proposed telemetry I had to be aware of what my personal filters were and there were a few biases I had developed that make me uncomfortable with Fedora and their future use of telemetry: a) IBM b) Large companies have a dubious record of using user data ethically - they exist to make money and so if they have opportunities to do so, they will and that means the user data will get sold, aggregated, indexed for personal info, etc… if not immediately, IT WILL happen eventually.
Having been in leadership in large corporations for decades myself, the introduction of telemetry is presented as responsible and harmless enough so the pill is easy to swallow. The future of how that data is used and expands is the major concern for me; it’s the exact situation of boiling a frog.
The individuals hoping to collect this telemetry may be great and ethical people wishing to do a net-good, however, these people are involved in a large organization with much larger powers and motives and so the original intent of doing only good with it will get lost. It can be no other way. I liked Fedora quite a lot but I recently switched upon hearing about their proposal - be it Opt-In or Opt Out was a moot point for me because I don’t trust they would even honor my selection anyway. My two cents, which is worth about half that…
I was thinking I was going to wait until Fedora 40 was closer to launch before I migrated all my personal VM’s over to Debian but I ended up doing it today to cut myself loose entirely of IBM’s shenanigans. It’s a shame about IBM leadership, but being in corporate leadership myself I’m certainly not surprised by any of their recent behavior. Where you have any large incentives (power, money, fame), you will see the uglier side of human nature.