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Manjaro distribution is introducing a system for sending telemetry about the system (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The developers of the Manjaro Linux distribution, built on the basis of Arch Linux and aimed at beginners, announced the beginning of testing a new service MDD (Manjaro Data Donor), designed to collect statistics about the system and send it to the external server of the project. The author of the MDD intended to enable telemetry by default (opt-out), but the decision has not yet been approved and, judging by the objections of some developers and users, it is likely that telemetry will be offered as an option requiring prior consent of the user (a request to enable telemetry is proposed to be added to the greeting interface after the first download).

The report includes data such as host name, kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information, network device MAC addresses, disk serial numbers, disk partition data, information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.

The sent data is stored on the project server in the ClickHouse database and visualized using the Grafana platform. The IP addresses of users are not stored, and the hash from the /etc/machine-id file is used as the system identifier.

Аccording to the code https://github.com/manjaro/mdd/blob/master/mdd.py#L40 sends everything.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I get the usefulness of technical telemetry such as kernel version, RAM, disk space, processor type, etc... but NIC MAC? HDD serial? WTF?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Those are absolutely ways of covertly identifying your device while technically not counting as "personal information" under privacy laws.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Serial numbers are hardly covert though... but yeah.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

The point is that it's a loophole in privacy laws so they don't have to outright tell people that they collect personal or identifying information. So they can legally mislead people by claiming it's anonymous telemetry in hopes that users don't actually look into it or understand the implications.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Yeah that makes no sense lol. Who needs MAC addresses to debug and fix bugs? No one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The first three octets of a MAC specify the manufacturer of a NIC chipset. That could come in handy for driver debugging.

Manufacturers and firmware versions of storage devices? You can make the argument; perhaps it would have helped figure out the SSD firmware bugs years ago.

But stuff like whether or not you have video capture card or your current system temperature stats? Nah.. that's getting into "identifiable information as toxic waste" territory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah, so take the vendor and device id and be done?

Why should they need my unique ID/MAC?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A MAC address isn't really unique. Each has six octets, of which three refer to the manufacturer. The other three octets have at most 16,777,216 possible values. That seems like a lot but it really isn't; a MAC is supposed to be unique on a LAN, not globally. Rollovers during manufacturing happen, and collisions are rare but happen once in a while.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Unique enough with the other hardware IDs

And still, absolutely no reason to go further then the first octets, to have the vendor and device

Or am I missing something?

And I'm currently a happy user of Manjaro since years. But this stuff really isn't what I want to have on my system ...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just defining the threat model of hardware addressing, as it stands.

I don't agree with them sending more than the first half either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

All good, just wanted to clarify what I meant

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I said elsewhere, I hope this is just some way to track changes over time per user.

But they need to take an anonymous hash of some non changing data or create an install id that is used for this and nothing else (e.g it identifies a unique user but not the person or hardware behind the user).

Too much identifying info is just pushed around like we shouldn't care, it's become a real problem.