Collecting data from Fedora user community
We had several discussions recently that could use some real-world data
on e.g.:
- x86_64-v2 prevalence
- GUILE usage in make/gdb
- count of systems with UEFI/GPT vs BIOS/MBR
- debugd server usage
- etc
The common thread is that some sort of measurement would help figuring
out the best technical solution for the Fedora community, but such
measurement would require transmitting and collecting data in the Fedora
infrastructure. Such telemetry is usually criticized from two related
angles: a general objection to online telemetry, and a practical
argument about the complicated legal ramifications of online data
collection in multiple jurisdictions. Stephen recently responded with an
eloquent argument why it's very hard to come up with an acceptable
collection scheme (see below).
This problem is of course not unique to Fedora---everyone is in the same
boat of finding a middle ground between anonymity and indiscriminate
data collection. I think most people would agree that data-driven
decisions are better than gut feeling-based ones, so it is to our
benefit to control and possibly allow _some_ data to be used for that
purpose.
Few days ago I attended a talk by a practicing data scientist working
with social data where the privacy issues are even more important: some
of the data can literally have life-altering consequences to people
covered by the collection. I asked him about the best practices and
guidelines for responsible data collection, and he directed me to this
presentation:
https://the-engine-room.github.io/responsible-data-handbook/pages/slides....
My personal take-aways from reading this material are:
- we're not alone in this---other people have thought through these
issues and came up with workable ideas
- it helps to keep things in perspective----the data about people's
computers is less consequential than e.g data about their ethnicity or
politics
- there are legal requirements for Consent (notice/disclosure): they are
workable, though
- it matters how the data is used: publishing full logs vs. using the
aggregated data for internal improvement
Anyway, this is my personal, uneducated take on it. Hope it is helpful.
On 6/18/21 9:39 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 at 01:51, Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>> The problems with this is that we are taking a fairly fuzzy data set
>>> and making it much easier to track individual users in ways seen as
>>> problematic by various laws and regulations.
>> Well, depends on how you store the data. You can store one record per
>> machine (with all properties in there), or you can store one record per
>> property per machine.
>>
>> With the latter you basically kill query on subgroups (like "how many
>> x86_64-v3 machines use UEFI?") because that grouping information is gone
>> if you store each end every little piece of information in its own
>> record. But it'll also much harder to do fingerprinting on such a data
>> base ...
>>
>> Standard disclaimer: IANAL.
>>
> The problem with IANAL, is that we all come up with great solutions
> which seem to match the single document we read. However the law is an
> interpreted language where every court is a slightly different
> architecture and has different libraries which have to be slowly
> interpreted and patched at a top level. This means that you end up
> with finding out that the document and 2500 years of law rulings have
> to be interpreted together.
>
> The way things are interpreted currently, it doesn't matter that you
> stored it differently.. it matters that you collected it... mainly
> because there is a long history of people finding ways to de-anonymize
> data, people lying about anonymizing it, and people somehow collecting
> the data in the middle. Because of that you end up having to delete
> all the data when someone asks to be deleted because you can't prove
> this record/count was their system or not.
>
> In general we computer people like to dive in and just collect data
> and go about doing analysis. The various privacy laws are written to
> make us do a LOT of hard work before we start doing that. You end up
> spending a lot of time with lawyers versed in European, Brazilian, and
> various other countries laws/regulations/past history to figure out
> what you can collect, how you can collect it, how you are going to
> delete it, how you are going to inform people that things are
> happening, and having clear processes that are followed. Then you can
> start writing the code.. while doing that you have to review the code
> to make sure it is still meeting current rulings. [Doing it another
> way ends up with you writing code and either finding you have to
> delete it all or waiting months for an approval before rolling it
> out.]
>