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> I've confirmed with Jamie B that the ping still needs to be sent
> mpt's going to come up with something better
I’m happy to come up with something better, if there’s a reason that I can explain. As I understand it, we let you decline data collection in case you are concerned about privacy. Given that, transmitting data either way is a strange thing to do, so we’d need a solid reason. A choice between “send system info” vs. “send … {something else}”, without a reason, would just make people angry.
I can’t say that it’s for counting users, since a one-time submission is no good for that, not tracking when machines are lost or destroyed or the user goes back to their Windows partition permanently. Weekly Active Device counts for default desktop snaps (currently within 0.9% of each other) would be more accurate for that, unless we have reason to believe that tens of thousands of users uninstall every snap after installation, or that hundreds of Snap Store Proxy users are wildly misreporting their deployments on setup.
And I can’t say it’s to ensure the validity of the sample, because at the magnitude we’re dealing with, the population size is irrelevant for that. (As I’ve calculated before, to get a 2% margin of error with 95% confidence from 500,000 Ubuntu users would require 2390 submissions, while from 100 million Ubuntu users it would require 2401 submissions. Hardly any difference, and we’ve already received massively more submissions than that.)