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by smhenderson 3052 days ago
I think you mean popcon? Short for popularity contest[1]. It's been part of Debian forever, not sure when it first showed up but it was part of Woody at least. With Debian you could configure it to use PGP and encrypt the reports you send in. I generally disabled it on work computers but left it on at home. That probably didn't help them as much but I just couldn't see leaving this type of feature on for servers and computers that weren't mine.

[1]https://popcon.debian.org/
1 comments
mrob 3052 days ago
Debian's installer requires explicit opt-in consent to install popcon. It's not enabled by default.
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smhenderson 3052 days ago
Yes, that's true. I do think that that's the better way to do it.

I understand Canonical is trying to make a user oriented system that "Just Works" and collecting this data can certainly help with that but I do think that this should be Opt In, not Out. If nothing else to support the precedent that, in general, Opt In is better for privacy that Opt Out.

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