Is not FUD; the full name, email and the rest were not META/corporations mandated, which are lobbying for it so they can earn money with users' preferences. Get your spyware to somewhere else.
If META's business model is not lucrative, is not my problem.
>which are lobbying for it so they can earn money with users' preferences
Given it's a field where you can put absolutely anything in (and probably randomize, if you want), how is this different than the situation today, where random sites ask you for your birthday (also unverified)? Moreover Meta already has your birthday. It's already mandated for account creation, so claims of "so they can earn money with users' preferences" don't make any sense.
This is against HN guidelines: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
>The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.
The operating system does not need to know your full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained. They added an extra optional field for the date of birth.
> Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats.
> systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained.
GECOS in 1962, and UNIX in '70s had them as well, and nobody threatened to kill their creators.
Having a field in a database is not equal to mandatory data collection. Let me remind of data that /etc/passwd allows to store on even an OS without systemd:
- User's full name (or application name, if the account is for a program)
- Building and room number or contact person
- Office telephone number
- Home telephone number
- Any other contact information (pager number, fax, external e-mail address, etc.)
> full name, email and location in order to manage your hardware and software, yet systemd has had optional fields for those for years and nobody complained.
Why, it's fine to have these values in a corporate environment: name, work email, office location. I'd be fine with an ability to store the birth date, the blood type, the zodiac sign, actually an arbitrary list of key-value pairs, as long as it's optional.
It's only a problem when the OS insists on recording your private information to let you access your private account.
Apple tv is quite a bit better than the other streaming services. If people truly cared they would either watch blu-rays or Apple tv. But few actually care.
I just woke up this morning and I am amazed. I am taking all my nasty words back and I starred the project and followed the author who reacted so fast to my dull negative feedback and this reaction shows how much he cares about the project.
My issue with telemetry is that 99% of software ends up not using it. Why have it? And definitely don't have it by default. Your users will come tell you what they want, making telemetry useless, especially when it's an OSS project you're mostly building for yourself.
Except that telemetry can give you more complete (and foolproof) information than what users report. But yeah, that could also be solved by having debug info that users can attach to their report, the app doesn't have to "call home" for that...
I agree, but it's a cost/benefit thing. Most OSS projects aren't big enough to do anything with the telemetry, so you're just paying in goodwill for no reason.
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