Comment 18 for bug 1133777

Clement,

On 14/11/13 03:01, Clement Lefebvre wrote:
> You can make your points without depicting us as criminals. I'm happy to
> explain decisions and consider changes as long as the discussion remains
> constructive.

At no point did I describe you personally, or other Mint contributors,
as criminals. Civil law applies to corporations, and the specific
example where I said Mint would be breaking the law was in relation to a
__hypothetical Mint corporate entity__.

I have a problem that you decided to wilfully ignore the privacy issues
associated with this problem.

I would like in future for these things to be carefully considered, and
evaluate Mint's existing functionality in light of this issue.

As an example, VLC has functionality allowing it to download metadata
and cover art related to music files, and provide usage statistics to
the project. When you first run VLC, it asks you if you wish to to
enable these functions, and allows you to disable them entirely.

Debian's installer has a function allowing you to participate in a
package popularity survey (popcon), which on installation, you are
presented with the choice of opting in to this. It also has an
installation report which you have the option of sending to Debian's
developers for statistical purposes.

In these two examples, the user is asked first, and acknowledgement is
required to proceed, and the option to opt-out is presented.

I also have a problem with the argument of "your ISP has more on you",
because there are legal barriers that apply to my ISP but not OpenDNS
(or anyone else for that matter).

Michael