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Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

Posted by Soulskill on from the following-bitprints-and-scrapes-on-the-router dept.

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."

6 of 548 comments (clear)

  1. Dear god I hope this stops the impending wave by ojintoad · · Score: 0, Redundant
    of privacy freakout from those who chose not to RTFA:

    The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell. This information will obviously be valuable to both companies to see whether customers are keeping around their Ubuntu installations or just wiping them and just how often Ubuntu is being used on these systems (judging by the number of times that system reported to Canonical's server previously). For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.

  2. Dear lord let this stop the impending wave by ojintoad · · Score: 0, Redundant
    of collective privacy handwringing:

    The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell. This information will obviously be valuable to both companies to see whether customers are keeping around their Ubuntu installations or just wiping them and just how often Ubuntu is being used on these systems (judging by the number of times that system reported to Canonical's server previously). For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.

  3. I for one by Dynetrekk · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I, for one, welcome our new Canonical overlords!

  4. They should have used popcorn by JackieBrown · · Score: 0, Redundant

    This would be similar to Debian's popularity-contest but with Debian you have to opt in.

    http://popcon.debian.org/

    It seems more useful since it tells Debian which packages you have installed in addition to the fact that you have Debian installed.

  5. They should have used popcorn by JackieBrown · · Score: 0, Redundant

    This would be similar to Debian's popularity-contest but with Debian you have to opt in.

    http://popcon.debian.org/

    It seems more useful since it tells Debian which packages you have installed in addition to the fact that you have Debian installed.

  6. Re:Rational Response by Richard_at_work · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Did you have to post this three times? Really?