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Thank you as well for the discussion! I think it helped me understand better the reason for my own reluctance to ignore even a pretty benign form of tracking by a FOSS project. First, I have no fear that LO will be used for nefarious purposes. And even in the worst, unlikely case of all collected data leaking or getting sold to FB, NSA or your-favorite-villain, the harm done will be several orders of magnitude less than the provided benefit of building a FOSS office suite. Viva LO, cheers to its developers. But we have an overall erosion of trust. We do not trust remote systems or software any more. In the age of shareware (mid-late 90s) software downloaded from unknown sources was in general assumed benign. Possibly stupid, but rarely actively harmful. Today, even with apps from Play/App-store, the default assumption is that they are trying to do something against the user. To install or not install question depends on whether the benefit they provide is greater than that harm. "Something against the user" is now monitoring and tracking (access to contacts, photos, camera, mic, WiFi info) and it is always explained as improving user experience. Sure. Seeing such logic instantly raises a red flag for me and, sadly, catches your use case as well. While I have no doubt that LO is doing none of this my thought (based on learned priors) is "Et tu, Brute". Just a guess, but in today's environment you may get better ROI (funding, advocacy, whatever) by not tracking users at all and prominently boasting of this. As I mentioned in the thread above, you probably can get most of the information you need to tune the site from web server logs anyway. Again, just a single user opinion / data point. |