Developers from Red Hat announced on the readiness of the tool gnome-info-collect to collect telemetry on systems that use the Gnome environment. Users who want to take part in data collection, offered ready-made packages for ubuntu, Opensuse, Arch Linux and Fedora.
Information transmitted will allow you to analyze the preferences of GNOME users and take them into account when making decisions related to increasing the convenience of work and developing the shell. With the help of the data obtained, developers will be able to better understand the needs of users and highlight areas of activity that should be paid to paramount attention.
Gnome-Info-Collect is a simple client-server application that collects data on the system and transmits them to the Gnome server. Data is processed impersonal, without saving information about specific users and hosts, but to eliminate duplicates, a hash with salt created on the basis of a computer identifier (/etc/machine-ine) and user name is attached to data. Before sending, the data prepared for transfer are shown to the user to confirm the operation. Data that can be used to identify the system, such as IP addresses and accurate time on the user side, are filtered and do not fall into the log on the server.
Among the information collected: the distribution system used, hardware parameters (including manufacturer and model data), a list of installed applications, a list of selected applications (submitted to the panel), availability of Flatpak support and access to Gnome Software, types of accounts used GNOME Online, included joint access services (DAV, VNC, RDP, SSH), settings of virtual desktop, the number of users in the system used by the Web-browser, included extensions of Gnome.