With the release of elementary OS 5 Juno still fresh, I wanted to take a moment and talk about our continued privacy focus with elementary OS. We’ve always been fanatical about respecting your privacy, but with Juno, we’ve added some awesome new features that have brought it to the forefront of my mind.

And with current trends in consumer technology, I feel it’s important to plant our feet in the ground.

Protecting Your Data from Us

First, elementary actively protects your data from ourselves. We believe respecting your privacy is the ethical thing to do; users have a fundamental right to the utmost privacy, even from companies and products they trust. And frankly, we don’t want the responsibility of handling your data or the possibility of being compelled by a nation state or other entity to give it up. So we just don’t collect it. At all.

elementary OS does not send any private data back to elementary. We don’t collect stats when you install it, we don’t collect usage analytics, and we don’t snoop on what you’re typing. That should be the status quo for software, but unfortunately for users and their privacy, it’s not.

Some people coming from this world of vacuuming up data ask us: how does elementary know what features to develop, which areas to focus on, how many daily active users we have? The answers vary, but generally: we actively engage with users, we have a vision for where we’re going, and… why do we need to know an exact number of daily active users again?

Strictly data-driven design actively trades users’ privacy for a ton of data. That data is then used to try and figure out what to work on, what features to add or drop, and where to spend resources. However, the data is only as good as those who are using it, and too often these troves of data can be used simply to push a pre-existing agenda. Not to mention opening the possibility of data leaks or a growing target for malicious or nation-backed hackers.