I actually have some telemetry enabled on my system, cause I want the maintainers of my distro to have more data to base their decisions on. I always disable everything for proprietary software though, and I dislike opt-out systems.
I only enable telemetry for software provided by nonprofit organizations that are legally obligated to publish detailed financial records. Never give anyone that reserves the right to sell you out any of the benefit of your data for free.
reserves the right to sell you out
Is Canonical actually doing that, though? Collecting data for product improvement purposes and collecting it to potentially sell to third parties are two wildly different things, and doing the former, even with the user’s consent, does not mean you automatically reserve the right to do the latter (or anything else, really) with the collected data, unless you explicitly already include that as an option and get consent for it as well. I haven’t looked into it myself, so I might be wrong here, but I’m guessing Canonical would be getting way more shit for this if they were actually reserving the right to outright sell the telemetry they’re collecting, rather than just use it for product planning and development.
What??? For realsies???
This is the “ad”. Personally, I don’t think a little plug like this is worth any kind of fuss. If it were a real ad or something, then yea I would get it.
Technically, but it’s coming from the same servers your packages are being downloaded from, right?