Unclear documentation around Telemetry

I stumbled across this youtube video calling Clear Linux “The devil” because Telemetry is ENABLED by default. That is FALSE. It is disabled by default. Source here and here. Telemetry is opt in.

Unfortunately this in not made clear in the documentation. It should say “Telemetry is opt in and disabled by default” At the top of every page that has anything to do with telemetry and telemetrics.

Many people, especially linux users, Hate auto telemetry and we should leave no doubt that clear linux does not send info back to intel by default. And we should say that everywhere someone could think to look for it.

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Thanks for posting this. We’ve discussed the video in the morning as well and we agree our documentation is clearly lacking this (critical) detail. Let’s hope it can be quickly rectified by the documentation team.

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You guys are awesome :slight_smile: Thank you for being concerned about this. It really helps build a great community when things like this are taken seriously.I posed in his subreddit about the misunderstanding and he said “Thanks so much for commenting and correcting my errors. I’ll definitely do an update video about this”. So that is fantastic.

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Hi Peter,

Thanks again for pointing this out. I’ve added notes to the telemetry guide – they should get merged this week (after being edited for clarity…). Really appreciate your efforts to spread the word that telemetry is disabled by default – you’re right, it’s a sensitive subject!

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The two telemetry documents are now up to date:

Concepts page:
https://clearlinux.org/documentation/clear-linux/concepts/telemetry-about

and the Guides page:
https://clearlinux.org/documentation/clear-linux/guides/telemetrics/telem-guide

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You can also check out this video overview to learn more about Telemetrics:

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Does telemetry still exists in Clear Linux ? Because I’ve opted in at install.

I’ve ran in terminal :

$ sudo telemctl is-active
sudo: telemctl: command not found

Our Telemetry server is currently down, so the utility was removed from the distro.

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