Skip to content

Clarify "collection" vs "transmission" in apps privacy policy

Nate Graham requested to merge work/apps-privacy-policy-update into master

A plain-English reading of the word "collection" suggests that it refers to the local gathering of information, as opposed to its remote transmission. However on the apps privacy policy page, it is currently used with two meanings. See for example this sentence in the "General Principle" section:

As a general rule, software produced by the KDE Community does not collect, transmit or otherwise transfer information from end-users devices except as a result of an explicit user action.

Here "collect" is being used to describe saving local state data, such as lists of recent documents. It is explicitly contrasted with the concept of transmission.

Now see this sentence in the "Telemetry" section:

With regards to information collected, only details on the device itself (such as the software versions installed and its hardware specifications) along with details on how our software is used (such as whether certain features are enabled and what plugins have been installed) are collected.

Here "collect" is used as a synonym of the word "transmit", since telemetry is all about transmitting information to someone else.

Using the same word with two meanings isn't ideal, especially for a document that needs technical precision to avoid confusing people. To improve clarity, this commit tweaks the page to use the word "transmission" instead of "collection" in any context where the thing being describes is in fact transmission and not saving data locally.

BUG: 466888

@sysadmin @teams/kde-ev-board

Merge request reports