Whether it is commercial or open source the solution has always been to explain to the user and ask informed consent. No one is so busy or so stupid that they cannot read a small para of text (possibly linking to a detailed document if they're so interested) and press one of two/three choices at some point during system setup or usage. Of course these permission prompts tend to grow out of hand as we can see from commercial operating systems but this is something Linux distributions can do better since nearly all software just want usage data and not user data like their commercial counterparts do.
I think it's a bit cliché; where do you draw the line? Should free software also display a copy of their license at first start and ask their users to click "I agree"?
When you start using a piece of software (free or not), there is a set of terms and conditions that you agree to (explicitly as is often the case with proprietary software or implicitly as with free software), which may include opt-out telemetry. As long as this is communicated, I don't see any problem with it.
To give credit where its due, I agree that Manjaro users may have never accepted opt-out telemetry when they first started using the OS and now this is being rolled out after the fact. Still, for a general-purpose OS that makes no privacy claims (e.g. Tails), I don't see how collecting their screen resolution etc makes a big difference. An average webpage today collects more than that in a single page view.
> When you start using a piece of software (free or not), there is a set of terms and conditions that you agree to (explicitly as is often the case with proprietary software or implicitly as with free software), which may include opt-out telemetry. As long as this is communicated, I don't see any problem with it.
Writing "our software is allowed to do whatever we want" somewhere deep in your terms of service doesn't actually give you the right to distribute malware.
> Still, for a general-purpose OS that makes no privacy claims (e.g. Tails)
Operating systems did not have to make privacy claims because this was assumed implicitly. It is a relatively recent fad to make everything online connected.
> I don't see how collecting their screen resolution etc makes a big difference. An average webpage today collects more than that in a single page view.
The specific data collected is irrelevant. I don't want my computer making any unneccessary connections to third parties.
> When you start using a piece of software (free or not), there is a set of terms and conditions that you agree to (explicitly as is often the case with proprietary software or implicitly as with free software), which may include opt-out telemetry.
ToC may include anything whatsoever, it doesn't mean it's binding (in B2C setting). Opt-out telemetry, in particular, is against reasonable expectations, and in much of the world isn't even legal in the first place.
