Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

suraj.sun passes along this excerpt from Phoronix: "Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an 'I am alive' ping to Canonical on a daily basis. When the canonical-census package is installed, the program is to be added to the daily Cron jobs to be executed so that each day it will report to Canonical over HTTP the number of times this system previously sent to Canonical (this counter is stored locally and with it running on a daily basis it's thereby indicating how many days the Ubuntu installation has been active), the Ubuntu distributor channel, the product name as acquired by the system's DMI information, and which Ubuntu release is being used. That's all that canonical-census does, at least for now. Previously there haven't been such Ubuntu tracking measures attempted by Canonical."

Comments

Re:Phone home?

[JustOK]

no, you could do less.

Re:Phone home?

[Zumbs]

As such, I don't mind either. I would probably let the feature stay enabled. But I do want easy access (no code digging) to see what information is being collected, who gets access to it and an easy way of turning the feature off. And I would consider it a courtesy if Canonical actually asked me.

It's no worse than Update Manager

[tepples]

My reaction to your postulated microsoft-census: "Doesn't Automatic Updates already do this?"

Re:It's about time

[John Hasler]

> They'll look at the numbers and think "hm, just as low as I thought"...

Regardless of what the numbers actually are.