I find myself in agreement.
I have access to the kuserfeedback data and to be honest I'm rather
dissatisfied with its actionability. There's nothing detailed like "x
percentage of users change the default wallpaper" or "y percentage of
users switch to double-click" that we could actually use to inform our
UI design--let alone anything that could be used to personally identify
anyone. The actual data set is so tame and uninteresting that I agree
that we could change our policy and release the stats just to show
everyone that we have nothing to hide.
Nate
On 2/25/20 5:44 AM, Veggero Nylo wrote:
Hi!
Currently, data transmitted by KUserFeedback is available only by
opening a sysadmin ticked explaining why you need access in the
first place. I can see the reasoning behind this, but I do not think
this is a good idea for developers and users. I think that releasing the
aggregated data under CC0 license would be better, as also proposed by
Martin here:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2017q3/003808.html. I think
this would benefit user trust, as right now they have to trust what the
KUserFeedback KCM without really being able to see what data KDE
developers are actually able to see (as most users won't be able to look
into the code); on the other hand, if the data was publicly released,
they would be able to see the data themselves and know exactly what
developers are going to see. I also think this would benefit developers,
as there might be a significant number of developers who could be
interested in looking to the data, maybe just a single value, without
being able to fully justify access to all the data (the fact that you
have to write a justification becomes a negative factor that makes
looking at the data less interesting); furthermore, even if they get
access to the data, they would be unable to discuss it in KDE
communication channels as those are public, nor on phabricator tasks to
support their patches, effectively making the data much less useful.
Also, the current policy might result in a privacy problem, e.g.: I once
needed data from stats.kde.org <http://stats.kde.org> regarding website
views over time. I was granted access to it, and I now can see every
singe website viewer, with their country, OS, browser, etc - much more
than I actually needed. If the aggregated data was to be released
publicly, I would no longer need for stats.kde.org
<http://stats.kde.org> access, and I would no longer be able to access
private data that I did not actually need. Finally, I do not fully
understand why the data needs to be kept private in the first place,
since it is supposed to be anonymous and contain no user content.
What's your opinion on this?
~ Niccolò Venerandi (aka veggero/niccolove)