Re: Phoning home
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:16:06 +0100
"Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@cateee.net> wrote:
> 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".
... unless the user specifically enables that option!
I, as a user, don't want to be warned, informed, asked or annoyed
in any other way about things that I don't want anyway. If I want to
send information I enable that explicitly.
To be clear, I don't really expect DDs to fix every single software to
not send any unnecessary information. It surely would be nice, but I'm
not sure about the feasibility. But if you do, please just deactivate
that functionality with the possibility to re-enable it, but without
annoying me, the user. Or we soon have conditions like on the other OS,
where you spend most of the time with clicking away pop-ups and moving
windows to some place that is not completely covered with balloons.
harry
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