The developers of the Fedora distribution announced the decision to integrate into the editions of the Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT and Fedora CoreOS distribution a component for sending statistics to the project server, allowing one to judge the number of users who have the distribution installed. Previously, similar statistics were sent in traditional Fedora builds, and now they will be added to atomically updated editions based on rpm-ostree.
Data sharing will be enabled by default in Fedora 34 IoT and Silverblue, with Fedora CoreOS coming in August. If you do not want to send data about your system, the user is asked to disable the rpm-ostree-countme.timer service with the command βsystemctl mask βnow rpm-ostree-countme.timerβ. It is noted that only anonymized data is sent and does not include information that could be used to identify specific users. The counting mechanism used is similar to the Count Me service used in Fedora 32, based on passing an installation time counter and a variable with data about the architecture and OS version.
The value of the transmitted counter increases every week. This method allows you to estimate how long the release in use has been installed, which is enough to analyze the dynamics of users switching to new versions and identifying short-lived installations in continuous integration systems, test systems, containers and virtual machines. A variable with data about the OS edition (VARIANT_ID from /etc/os-release) and the system architecture allows you to separate editions, branches and spins.
Source: opennet.ru