Developers at Red Hat have announced the availability of the gnome-info-collect tool for collecting telemetry about systems running the GNOME environment. Ready-made packages for Ubuntu, openSUSE, Arch Linux and Fedora are offered to users who wish to participate in data collection.
The information provided will allow us to analyze the preferences of GNOME users and take them into account when making decisions related to improving the usability and development of the shell. With the help of the received data, developers will be able to better understand the needs of users and highlight areas of activity that should be given priority.
Gnome-info-collect is a simple client/server application that collects system data and passes it to the GNOME server. The data is processed anonymously, without storing information about specific users and hosts, but to avoid duplicates, a hash with a salt is attached to the data, created based on the machine ID (/etc/machine-id) and username. Before sending, the data prepared for transmission is shown to the user to confirm the operation. Data that can be used to identify the system, such as the IP address and the exact time on the user's side, is filtered out and is not logged on the server.
Information collected includes: distribution used, hardware settings (including manufacturer and model), list of installed applications, list of favorite applications (displayed on the panel), flatpak support and access to Flathub in GNOME Software, types of accounts used in GNOME online , enabled sharing services (DAV, VNC, RDP, SSH), virtual desktop settings, number of users per system, web browser used, enabled GNOME extensions.
Source: opennet.ru