Smolt: Fedora Hardware Profiler

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 17:11 -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "Ralf" == Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> writes:
> 
> >> The smolt data looked quite nice to me.  Good stuff to know.
> 
> Ralf> Pardon, but you'd better never mention the word "security" in a Fedora
> Ralf> context again ;)
> 
> Yeah.  It's kind of hard to want to get involved again.
> 
> I understand you're more worried about people somehow getting your
> hardware profile than I am.  That's even understandable.  What I don't
> understand is why clicking "No" is not enough.
It's probably a cultural difference.

In Europe, esp. in Germany, "data collectionitis of certain enterprises"
and "data privacy" are _VERY_ _HOT_ political topics.

This manifests at various places, e.g. Germany having very restrictive
laws on "data privacy" and the public/press/media's attitude being very
hostile against anybody "collecting data". Also, probably unlike in many
other parts of the world people around here are conscious about "data
privacy" and often have a negative attitude against institutions
collecting data.

Fact is, what you seem to take for granted, isn't in Germany. The legal
details are complicated, it would require to be a laywer to elaborate,
but German's laws mandate "explicit opt-in" and mandate explicit
regulations on many other details (e.g. timed deletion of data)
in many situations.

Though this isn't 100% legally mandated, this has lead to many people in
Germany to consider "opt-in" as a matter of fairness and consider
enterprises choosing "opt-out" to be playing foul and to be jerks.
I had mentioned this aspect in a very early mail of this thread, but ...
this had been pushed aside.

IMO, you and Fedora are vastly underestimating the situation. You
understand you are playing with a loaded gun here and are better off
taking concerns about it seriously.

Ralf