innovation or invasion of privacy?

The development team behind Fedora, one of the most popular distributions linux, proposed a new idea that may cause controversy in the community. They want to include a feature in Fedora Workstation that will collect anonymous system usage data.

This feature, called Display Systems Metrics, will run through GNOME Usage, a computer resource monitoring application. She will send to the server red hat statistics about what screen resolutions, refresh rates, and connection types Fedora Workstation users are using. This data will help developers improve support for various displays and graphics cards.

The team assures that data collection will be completely voluntary and anonymous. Users will be able to disable this feature at any time in the system settings. They will also be able to see what data is being sent and why it is needed. In addition, the team promises that it will not collect any personal data such as IP addresses, device IDs, or information about other applications.

But not everyone in the Linux community approves of this idea. Some consider this to be a violation of user privacy and contrary to the philosophy of free software. They also fear that Red Hat may use this data for commercial purposes or pass it on to third parties. Red Hat is a large company that develops and supports Linux and other products based on it. In 2018, it was bought by IBM for $34 billion.