Measuring success/failure in the installation

[Evan Dandrea]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> You knew you'd get this response eventually ...

But of course :)

> While I believe you are trying to solve an important problem, I don't think
> this is the right way to go about it.  I do not think a design the phones home
> by default is appropriate for Ubuntu.  I don't think that opt-out via pre-
> seeding is acceptable even if on by default is determined to be acceptable as
> it limits this to expert users.  Privacy should be for everyone.

I think there is a large overlap between expert users and those who
believe that the anonymous sending of a simple pass/fail response can
be considered a privacy issue.  This especially at a time when you're
likely to be giving up more interesting information just by sending
this email.  Chances are you use GMail, Windows, OS X, Chrome, Chrome
OS, or Firefox, all of which send data back to their creators.  I
believe that users' willingness to use these applications without
complaint shows a general acceptance of parting with such small
amounts of insignificant data, which again enriches their experience.
But if we are to force an extreme privacy view on them, should we also
modify Firefox to not check against the plugin blacklist unless the
user first checks a box on the preferences page or clicks through a
dialog?

I think the overlap between users who read and consider every bit of
text in the installer and people who are otherwise not bothered about
sending this data to be quite small. I especially do not want us to
move in the direction of having every bit of measurable data that
these users generate and send out to the Internet wrapped in a
checkbox, as a means of forcing a particular view on them and on the
Ubuntu project by ensuring that a sufficiently small number of people
ever see such a feature, neutering it to such an extent that it
becomes useless.

I also believe the small set of data we would get in such a neutering
would largely come from Ubuntu enthusiasts, and I wonder if the data
would skew towards a certain set of choices (maybe they often use
advanced partitioning, for example).

> I would recommend instead one more checkbox in the existing setup that invites
> the user to provide installation success information to help improve Ubuntu
> and it should be unchecked by default.

I disagree, for the above reasons.  Putting this behind a checkbox
that isn't checked by default is a sure-fire way to have it ignored by
the largest of percentages.

> This is something that is a significant change that should be reviewed and
> approved by the Tech Board and possibly the CC.

I believe it's the domain of the Tech Board, if it comes to that.