> I would like Linux distributions to ship a system wide telemetry service that can be enabled / disabled at the installation time or anytime later on.

There's nothing stopping a person from creating that. You'd package it up and get it added to the Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, etc. repos and people would be able to install and use it. That's about as close as you'll get to having it generally available for all Linux distros.

Personally I don't see the value, and think it's invasive, so I would never install it, but people who wanted it would be able to use it.

I think what they meant is to configure proxying all possible telemetry via this service, and enforce anonymisation. Sounds good imho. I'm trying to disable telemetry but it's always a losing game, each version adds something new to each app.

I don't think that changes my answer.

The telemetry proxy service would need packages for each distro, including scripts to work with systemd and init, and maybe a "libtelemetry" package to make using the service easier.

The way I see it working is that if the system service isn't installed, isn't running, or has remote telemetry turned off then the commands for sending telemetry will succeed but send the data to /dev/null. Otherwise the data gets anonymized and uploaded to the user's configured telemetry host.

It could almost be built on syslog, now that I think about it more, but that would be terrible.

They kind of do. Pop-con (popularity contest) is in Debian to track package usage. https://popcon.debian.org/

LVFS also has some: https://lvfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/telemetry.html

This page from Debian Wiki may be interesting to see what all is out there: https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues

The thing I like about popcon is it's opt-in, and disabled by default.

I enable it on my personal production systems and disable on everything else, both on privacy grounds (work), and not providing wrong data (disposable VMs).

> it's opt-in, and disabled by default

This is the right approach.

Or they could just charge some nominal fee (/amount of computing resources?) from the consuming entities.

Love the idea!

I do not think a centralized "system wide telemetry" service is a good idea. This has a huge potential for abuse and can be extended to collect other things.

Privacy should be privacy by default, and if you want users to send you crash/usage logs then you need to show them all of the dirty details, let them review it and chose whether or not to send.