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