Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of March 11th, 2014

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi all;

I am less interested in where the toggle lives[0] than who is storing
the data, and what kind of data it is.

the first question regards *where* is the data going to be sent and/or
stored: the GNOME Foundation cannot run a web service with user
credentials for everyone on the Internet, for a variety of reasons
already discussed when we decided to host an OwnCloud instance on
gnome.org[1]. ratings from the 500-odd members of the Foundation would
clearly be worse than useless (let's just say that it wouldn't be a
credible sample of our users), so hosting this stuff just for the
foundation is clearly a no go. if we're asking downstream distributors
to host this service then we'll have to ensure that they are complying
with a privacy policy that we define, which is going to be
"interesting" when it comes to the legal side.

the other question regards *what* is actually being communicated: if
it's not just a case of application ratings and comments, but of
actual user metrics[2] then we're going to have to do a lot in terms
of anonymisation of the collected data, as well as comply with a ton
of data retention laws around the planet. also, and this is related to
who is going to store this data, how do we get metrics back? in which
form? who is going to analyse it?

it would be good to have a discussion about these two points, more
than debating the initial state of the settings key.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] with my GNOME community member hat on: I implicitly trust all the
people involved in this; not just because I pride myself of
considering them friends, but also because I know they are known to
have high moral standing in the community. I also happen to daily run
other code that they wrote, and if all else fails, I have access to
the code in question. erring on the side of precaution is fine, but
I'm starting from a position of trust, and I strongly ask that
everybody do so, to avoid the thread degenerating into a flame war.[3]
[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2014-February/msg00120.html
[2] which applications have been launched, how have they been
launched, duration of interaction with the shell and applications,
maybe web pages visited, number of searches in the shell, etc.
[3] and now, with my director hard hat on: I consider that a fair
warning. flames shan't be tolerated, and we'll drop the hammer of
moderation *hard* if that happens.


On 24 March 2014 15:47, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:
> Luc Pionchon <pionchon luc gmail com> wrote:
> ...
> > I think that this is not enough: The user is not always the one who
> > does the initial setup. Also the initial setup may have happened long
> > ago, who will remember what he selected during initial setup?
>
> I think we want this to be off by default, and have initial setup turn
> it on after checking with the user. That way it won't get turned on if
> initial setup isn't used for some reason.
>
> Allan



-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/