EFF & Privacy; hopefully Ubuntu will listen to users

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 03:28:44PM +0000, J Fernyhough wrote:
> I'm currently looking into how Ubuntu meets the provisions of the Data
> Protection Act 1998, and more crucially what would need to be done to
> meet the requirements, so that I have some base of evidence and legal
> reasoning to put forward (for example, at no point in the download or
> installation process is it identified which information is being
> gathered, how it will be stored, by whom, how it will be used, or who
> to contact).

Not during installation, but I believe I've seen a "Legal notice" link
displayed somewhere in the Unity UI which has that information.
(Apologies for vagueness; I don't work on this stuff myself.)

> (As an aside, it appears that being only enthusiastic about Ubuntu and
> all decisions, or at least getting in line, is a requisite for
> employment there.)

I can only speak for myself and I don't do very much hiring nowadays
since I quit management, but this is certainly not true of the hiring
decisions I've made.  One of my routine interview questions is along the
lines of asking what we are doing wrong and how we could improve it, and
I give considerable weight to non-trivial answers; I've never been
interested in hiring yes-men, and I would probably mark somebody *down*
for being too uncritically enthusiastic (if we're so perfect, what are
you going to do for us then ...).

Of course, the "how we could improve it" bit is important; employees
need to achieve goals which often implies being pragmatic about how they
approach problems, and they don't necessarily have the luxury of going
in all guns blazing all the time.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]