Fedora, UUIDs, and user tracking



"User tracking" is generally contentious in free-software communities—even if the "tracking" is not really intended to do so. It is often distributions that have the most interest in counting their users, but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious than users of more mainstream desktop operating systems. The Fedora project recently discussed how to count its users and ways to preserve their privacy while doing so.
Ben Cotton brought up the topic in the context of a proposal for Fedora 30. Instead of the current method of counting unique IP addresses that request updates from the DNF mirrors, which is an unreliable estimator of Fedora usage, the proposal would create a unique user ID (UUID) for each installed system that would be sent with DNF mirror-list requests. It explicitly calls out privacy concerns: "We don't want to track; just count."
The proposal outlines the kind of information that the project would like to count, including the version of Fedora, the Fedora variant (or spin), and the architecture of the machine. It would also be useful to have some way to distinguish long-lived installations from one-off test systems in virtual machines. Currently, variants cannot be distinguished and the unique IP counting method both undercounts systems behind network address translation (NAT) and overcounts systems that change IP addresses frequently. The UUID is similar to what openSUSE uses, so "this is ground already traveled".
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