Is there telemetry in this?

General Discussion
1

Hi, new here. Never heard of Clear Linux before, learned about it, and very intrigued. Then I saw a video on YouTube with someone pointing out there is telemetry. Is that true?

The world is just waiting for someone to take the lead in Linux distroland and knock W10 off its perch. Intel has the resources. But telemetry puts you in the same boat as MS - it’s one (though only one) of the reasons that people are trying to get off W10. If you really have telemetry in this thing, it’s a complete non-starter for me and a lot of other folks. (If you don’t understand why, I guess my best suggestion is to start reading history books).

So, can someone please clarify, so I can decide if I want to take the next step and install Clear Linux?

Thanks

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2

Is your choice to enable or disable telemetry.

3

telemetry is optional, and lives at telemetrics bundle,

https://clearlinux.org/documentation/clear-linux/guides/telemetrics

if you do not install telemetrics bundle, you dont have telemetrics.

4

I’ll also add that the telemetry solution is open source and customizable; you can redirect it to your own backend server instead of the CL one and create your own events, if you wish.

5

Thanks to all for the clarifications.

6

This is the code

7

I can’t believe nobody yet has mentioned that telemetry in Clear Linux is OPT-IN.

By default, it will not be installed or enabled. We don’t sneak it in to your installation. Even if the telemetry bundle is installed, you have full control over it and can opt-in/opt-out while still monitoring the data that applications generate - even though it will never be sent out from your computer.

Note, our telemetry code is really strict and removes any possible PII we can find as much as possible, and data is sent anonymous to the telemetry servers. There is no way to identify a specific system - to the developers, it is as if the machines that report telemetry just appear, and then later vanish forever.

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8

Thanks. I think the video I saw on YouTube was a bit misleading (or, more charitably, not as informative as it could have been). Hopefully this discussion will clarify things for other folks that share my concerns.

9

I think I saw the same video (not going to link to it), but was it the one where the guy didn’t even install it and just made a bunch of guesses of what he thinks clear is?

10

There might be a couple of videos that fit that description :slight_smile:

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