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My response to @fedora’s proposal to implement opt-out data collection in Fedora, which was marked as hidden and “flagged as inappropriate: the community feels it is offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines.”
Posting it here, on a space I own, where it cannot be marked as anything by Fedora/Red Hat/IBM:
#fedora #surveillance #privacy #ibm #redHat #telemetry
1/N
@fedora “If this is a feature you believe people want, make the toggle switches off by default so folks can excitedly tell you how much they want to send data to Fedora/Red Hat/IBM.
Also, is this a feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
…”
2/N
@fedora “…If not, and it’s something people will absolutely love, I hope it will be implemented for all your paying enterprise customers also. After all, I’m sure you’d hate for folks to think you believe corporations deserve privacy whereas people don’t. I have no doubt it will go down great with large corporations (they love profiling people so I guess that means they’d love getting profiled too, right? Unless they’re hypocrites, of course).”
3/3
@fedora Update: Looks like my post on Fedora’s forum has been unflagged now.
@aral post seems to be visible again, but I can confirm that it showed up as "hidden" just a few minutes ago.
@decathorpe @aral thanks for the clarification.
@aral this response is amazing, thank you. please repost it from time to time to see if it will happen again.
@aral It definitely still shows up as hidden to me (not a user registered on the site).
@ceremus Ah, looks like they hid it again.
Whatever.
If you take the word literally, you are right.
But let's be honest for a moment: The Fedora Project still has close ties to Red Hat (like sponsoring and a percentage of project contributions, being the upstream source for RHEL, etc.).
Soo... I would argue that my statement "in principle" still stands.
I'm not going to throw anyone under this very angry bus, but the community member who flagged that post as off topic is not a Red Hatter, and neither was the moderators who approved it.
I _am_ a Red Hatter, and whatever their corporate faults, I am happy to be paid full time to work on free and open source software built by an amazing community.
I don't believe anything on topic was removed from any of the discussion, except for a few extreme personal attacks.
FWIW: My opinions and statements were intended in relation to/"against" corporate stuff, not against individual people or the community.
Sometimes, emotions flare up against one practice or another, especially, well, if topics like opt-in/opt-out come up, (which also seems to be a clash of different philosophies).
But certainly nobody deserves to be thrown under figurative or literal busses for that.
And yes, for me personally, "opt-out" is a standard "corporate" tactic. But then again, I am only one person.
@gabek @aral Yeah unfortunately I expect to see more of this, especially from instances that set themselves up out of enthusiasm for technology and weren't interested in preparing for the people-problems that come with managing large community spaces.
Trust & Safety is a BRUTAL job when done correctly by people with experience, and even the "easy" calls will have one party walking away angry. That's just the nature of moderation, and it underlines just how much rides on getting it right.
Yeah, community management is actually a professional discipline, believe it or not.
Even our tiny instance, which is like 1% of their size, has written moderation processes & policies, and vetted codes of conduct without ambiguity like "no advocacy".
Megainstances that intentionally grow massive owe more to the safety of their people than to treat things like a hobby.
@decathorpe @ceremus It’s fine. Thanks for trying.
I won’t waste my time with the forums in the future and just share my thoughts here.
@aral @ceremus I'm not sure I like how this discussion is turning out either ... it's the first proposal that's being discussed on Discourse instead of the mailing list, and almost all the things people said would happen *did* happen (more or less arbitrarily hiding posts / splitting them off into different topics, etc.), which is definitely something we'll need to consider when deciding if we want to use Discourse for this in the future. 
It wasn't me, but I looked now and, despite your follower count and all, I think I support that moderator's "off-topic" call.
This is a Fedora proposal. Fedora isn't RHEL, has no influence over RHEL decisions, and doesn't have "paying enterprise customers".
As someone else has pointed out, RHEL does have Insights. But ... that _really_ seems like a whole off-topic tangent.