[paavoova]

It's interesting to see how this discussion steers towards privacy. Some distributions, like Ubuntu for example, are far less conservative. Besides the NTP tracking mentioned in the article, there's the Amazon fiasco of past, and Ubuntu 18.04 installs quite bit of telemetry [1], including tracking packages. It ships with a "dynamic" MOTD that runs a script periodically which downloads updates from Canonical. While this may be useful for server administrators who wish to be notified of products and updates, it has at one point shown ads for an HBO show [2].

Annoyingly, while installing the Xubuntu flavor, there appeared to be no option to opt out nor was there even mention of any such telemetry in the live installer interface. I had to track down and disable manually post installation - something the average user is not going to bother with and what Canonical is surely betting on. I appreciate how Poettering brings up trust and "red flags", knowing full well the lower the transparency, the larger the reactionary incentive for users to opt out or disable such telemetry. Canonical could perhaps take note.

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1027532/how-to-opt-out-of-sy... [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/17...