14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop Will Cooke announced today that the company wants to implement some data collecting mechanism in future releases of Ubuntu Linux to improve the things that matter most to users.
The information Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop engineers need to improve certain aspects of the Linux-based operating system about includes users' setups, installed software, Ubuntu flavor and version, network connectivity, CPU family, RAM, disk size, screen resolution, GPU vendor and model, as well as OEM manufacturer.
In addition, the company says that it needs to know your location, yet it promises to not store IP addresses of users. Other information that would be collected includes total installation time, automatic login info, selected disk layout, LivePatch enablement, and if you choose to install updates or third-party software during installation.
"We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," says Will Cooke, Director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
The data collection option will be implemented in the installer
Canonical says that it plans to implement the new data collection option in the installer through a checkbox named something like "Send diagnostics information to help improve Ubuntu" and enabled by default. Of course, users will be able to uncheck this box during the installation if they don't want Canonical to collect their data.
However, it's important to know that this would help the Ubuntu Desktop development team to focus their efforts on the things that matter the most to you in future versions of Ubuntu. Also, Canonical said that all the collected data from the installation would be securely sent to a service run by Canonical’s IS team via HTTPS.
The data is saved locally, on your computer, and would be sent to Canonical on first boot if an active network connection is detected. Users will be able to access the respective file that contains the collected data and inspect it thoroughly. Canonical said that the results of this data collection would be made public.
The company will also update its Ubuntu privacy policy to reflect this change starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system that is expected to arrive this spring on April 26, 2018. Feedback and comments on this matter are welcomed and valued by Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team.