The goal of this change proposal is to provide the Fedora community with accurate, representative data about the real world use of Fedora Workstation. By doing this, we believe that we can accelerate the development of Fedora Workstation, and ensure that it improves in line with our users’ needs and requirements.

Protecting user privacy is of utmost importance for this initiative. To this end, the service will only collect generic, standardized data, and will never collect anything that is personally identifying. It will also, of course, be fully open source. On the server side, the data will be stored in a way that prevents user identification.

Another important aspect of the initiative is that it will be run in a transparent manner, and will be governed as part of the Fedora project. Although this change is proposed by Red Hat, a new SIG will be responsible for the service and will be open to community participation. It will publish analyses of the data which has been collected, provide documentation about how the service operates, share samples of the database data, and respond to requests from the community.

Finally, we intend to ensure that metrics reporting is fully under the control of end users. Metrics collection will default to off, and will only be enabled through a clear on/off prompt in initial setup. Users will be able to view the data that has been collected locally, and will be able to remove the client software from their systems, should they choose to do so.

To address concerns that the community might have, the change owners have created a privacy and transparency checklist, which will be updated as the initiative progresses.

• Change proposal
• devel-announce post
• Discourse discussion
• Owners: @aday @catanzaro

Owners, do not implement this work until the FESCo vote has explicitly ended.
The Fedora Program Manager will create a tracking bug in Bugzilla for this Change, which is your indication to proceed.
See the FESCo ticket policy and the Changes policy for more information.

REMINDER: This ticket is for FESCo members to vote on the proposal. Further discussion should happen in the devel list thread linked above.