Canonical wants to gather more user data to improve Ubuntu
Will Cooke, head of the Ubuntu Desktop team, today announced that the company hopes to improve some of its data collection mechanisms in future Ubuntu Linux distributions in order to extract more useful information to improve the system. The system collects user settings, installed applications, Ubuntu flavor and hairstyle versions, network connectivity, CPU family, memory, disk space, screen resolution, GPU vendors and models, and OEMs.
In addition, the team wanted to know the user’s address, but the company promised not to store the user’s IP address. Other collected information also includes the total system installation time, automatic login information, the selected disk layout, whether to activate LivePatch and the option to install updates or third-party software during installation.
Will Cooke said: “We want to focus engineering development on what’s most important to the user, so we need to get more data on how users set up and run the software, and the related data collection options are implemented in the installer.”
Canonical said it plans to alert users by “sending diagnostic messages to improve Ubuntu during the installation,” which is checked by default, but can be canceled during the installation if the user does not want Canonical to collect the data.
