From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.ubuntu

On Mon, 2/23/2026 8:15 PM, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Lawrence DrCOOliveiro wrote:

On Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:43:04 -0800, El Kabong wrote:

The guy who runs Canonical put telemetry in Linux.

Where?

Maybe he means the installer prompt to send system specs ONE TIME after
the install to Canonical, or the crash reports you are also prompted to
send to help in debugging. Note that in each I said *prompt*, you are
given the option each time, and you can inspect the report each time.
Hardly "telemetry" as one gets with other OS's.

I have a simpler definition for this.

"Any form of excessive busywork in the background"

There is tracker and tracker-miner, there can on some distros be
"usage statistics", where as a user I have never noticed the user
community frequent use of certain utilities, *ever* causing those
utilities to be installed by default.

When I booted up Zorin LiveDVD, there was a burst of network activity
(and not the burble of DHCP either). Someone was receiving a good-morning-gram. And that is an example of busywork. And as busywork, should I be interested
in what is shooting up there ? That represents "a load on my mind", just
one more thing to remember. It doesn't matter what's in there, it's
an irritant. If you want to send good-morning-grams, print on the
graphics screen in the form of a notation, what was sent, then fade it out.

Thunderbird has this too, attempts to track how many installs have
been done and so on. One of the prices you pay for this, is an
excessively complex "profiles.ini".

The reason for my definition, is I don't want to get bogged down
into discussions of "well, what could they do with this information?".
That's a waste of the users time, installing walls and fences,
digging trenches, covering holes in the back garden with nylon
outdoor carpet. We shouldn't have to clean up this crap or
intervene. I shouldn't need to be install PI-Holes.

If you install the Diagnostic Data Viewer in Windows, the detail
goes down to the level of whether you copied and pasted in Notepad,
and whether you edited in markup mode (so it is tracking attach rate on
a new feature). At one time, the DDV was entirely useless, just
a shit-storm of numbers. Today, there is a good degree of plaintext,
but as "studies" go, it's still over the top. I would have preferred
to see "logs of crashes and install failures" shooting up to Vortex,
but anything like that is relatively skeletal as "Telemetry". They
do shoot up a snapshot collecting environment details on a major
failure, and on my slow ADSL2 upload, that can take as long as
a hour to complete. If you scroll the DDV, you'll be dizzy in no-time :-)
But to give them credit, it's marginally more transparent, whether it is complete or not.

Paul

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