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💡 portal for anonymous telemetry. Hear me out!

Many developers want to have telemetry so that they can learn about how their app is used and how they perform.

It can lead to better software, but it's also a privacy nightmare 😮‍💨

Currently, apps need to enable full network for it (or more) and users have 0 control over it. This is happening. Right now.

What if there was a way to remove all the negative aspects of telemetry so that we can consider it safe? 🛡️

1/2 🧵

With a telemetry portal for apps, we could

• Let the user enable or disable telemetry per app
• Be transparent about what is being sent
• batch, throttle and schedule transmissions
• deduplicate efforts to collect generic info

Combined with a trusted server to process and relay, we can

• anonymize
• aggregate
• make public

Worth thinking about, no?

2/2 🧵

@sonny …wouldn’t devs always be able to just ask for network permissions and keep business as usual?

@xerz the network permission is not considered safe in Flatpak / Flathub

That's why we have leverage.

Maksym Hazevych

@sonny @xerz honesty I don't think neither users nor developers really care for what Flathub considers unsafe, and maybe in part because of such silliness as considering network access unsafe.

I like the idea, but honestly I only care for the ability to turn telemetry on/off, especially if I can make it off by default

@mks_h @xerz

This wouldn't be possible if network was considered safe and had no penalty.

It's not silly, it's honest and forward-looking.

It gives the platform leverage and will let us innovate and do what no other platform does.

But I'm not interested in debating this again tbh :)

@sonny what is the penalty?

Users not installing it because it show a "potentially" unsafe warning?

@mks_h @xerz