Am 16.04.2016 01:46 schrieb Albert Vaca:
What's the problem with pinging the Neon servers? Any system already does
way more than that when checking for updates, not to mention when you
connect to a website, or even IRC.

How can this ping be violating any privacy if we don't even need to store the IP, just a unique ID? We can even generate the ID ourselves so it can't be matched with other sources. I don't see how this can have any impact to
privacy nor any other use than counting people using Neon.

I don't understand this extremism and I'm sad to see it in our community, specially when other free projects like Firefox have been collecting way
more complex analytics (opt-out) for a while with a positive impact for
them.

When I write software to be used all over the world, I not only need to consider what is important to me, but what might be important to people in any other form of society. After that I can decide what to actually implement and what not. Calling concerns for privacy "extremism" does not help anyone. Maybe many Chinese or Turkish people feel discompfort if their application usage is tracked. And in my opinion, anyone should. There is no name tag on those data, you say? Well, the name tag does not matter anymore these days because with "big data" you can link anonymous user profiles to other traces the user has left somewhere else and *bang* you know the identity of the user. You can read about that in several places:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/536 (paywall)
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf

A politician in Germany once got all the anonymous user data from his cell phone company and handed it over to a newspaper in order to show that data preservation or data retention actually means. The newspaper visualized it and it turned out it was quite obvious that in such an amount of data, there is no anonymity.
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

So, my opinion is that software should not track users more than necessary for it to work properly. So of cource a GPS tracker needs to track the user's position ... but a photo app does not, by default. I see why companies feel a need to track users so they can streamline their development and all. But Free Software? Anyway, if wee feel the need to do it, I would vote for an opt-in solution shown in the first install wizard.

Regards,
Frederik
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