The Fedora Project has voted to approve opt-in telemetry for Fedora 42 Workstation, following a contentious process.

Fedora’s maintainers originally proposed including opt-out telemetry in Fedora 40 Workstation, a proposition that drew widespread criticism and condemnation since it would be enabled by default. While the proposal emphasized that all telemetry would be anatomized, critics remained unconvinced. As a general rule, Linux users tend to value their privacy much more than Windows or Mac users, making opt-out telemetry a non-starter.

The maintainers took the criticism to heart and revamped the proposal, this time around opt-in telemetry, meaning users have to explicitly enable it. The revised proposal passed with a 6-0 vote.

The proposal includes the follow details:

The goal of this change proposal is to provide the Fedora community with accurate, representative data about the real world use of Fedora Workstation. By doing this, we believe that we can accelerate the development of Fedora Workstation, and ensure that it improves in line with our users’ needs and requirements.

Protecting user privacy is of utmost importance for this initiative. To this end, the service will only collect generic, standardized data, and will never collect anything that is personally identifying. It will also, of course, be fully open source. On the server side, the data will be stored in a way that prevents user identification.

Another important aspect of the initiative is that it will be run in a transparent manner, and will be governed as part of the Fedora project. Although this change is proposed by Red Hat, a new SIG will be responsible for the service and will be open to community participation. It will publish analyses of the data which has been collected, provide documentation about how the service operates, share samples of the database data, and respond to requests from the community.

Finally, we intend to ensure that metrics reporting is fully under the control of end users. Metrics collection will default to off, and will only be enabled through a clear on/off prompt in initial setup. Users will be able to view the data that has been collected locally, and will be able to remove the client software from their systems, should they choose to do so.

It’s good to see the Fedora maintainers listen to the community and change course. A number of open source projects—including KDE—use opt-in telemetry, demonstrating its viability as an option for privacy-conscious user bases.