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:Double standard

[Ironhandx]

Microsoft already does this, and has for a number of years and they still haven't been fined by anyone for the practice. They just don't TELL you they're doing this. I prefer the honesty and the simple goal from Canonical.

Re:Double standard

[jejones]

It's open source. If you have any questions about just what it does, you can find out for yourself.

Re:Phone home?

[Zumbs]

No offence, but that is not what I would consider "easy". It should be possible to find that information directly in the GUI, and the package should be simple to disable. Possibly by adding a privacy tab somewhere?