Re: Phoning home

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@cateee.net>]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 07:26:37AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 04:25:28PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 10:16:29AM +0100, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> > > > > Speaking as a human being, I would suggest that Debian policy should be
> > > > > that all "phoning home" MUST be enabled explicitly, and MUST be turned
> > > > > off by default.
> > > "should" here would only mean that we've failed to correctly define "phoning
> > > home".
>
> > So that'd be something like "Packages should not communicate on the
> > network except as specifically necessary for their functionality. In
> > particular they must not `phone home' by contacting a central service to
> > report user statistics back to the author, unless the user specifically
> > enables that option." ?
>
> s/should not/must not/, then yes. :)

No, I think "should not" on the first sentence is good.
I think it is difficult to require the strict "necessary",
i.e. the http clients usually send locale and OS information
to the server.
I think that the "must not phone home" on the second sentence
is quite enough (and BTW I like the definition of aj).

I would add an additional sentence at the end:
"Additionally, central services that are known to collect/use
unnecessary information must be avoided, unless the user
is warned".

But I let others to rewrite this sentence in a good way.

ciao
	cate