GOOSE is a new privacy-first anonymous statistic collector for Gentoo systems. The primary aid of the project is to collect metrics concerning installed packages and the package build environment in order to aid developers in decision making. Example uses include choosing how to divide one's time between packages and monitoring transition to new profiles.
We realize that Gentoo users are conscious of privacy concerns, and the participation is entirely voluntary and opt-in. At the same time, we put our effort to ensure that the data is collected and transmitted securely. The reports are decomposed immediately upon being reserved, and only individual item counts are stored in the database. The submissions are periodically included in bulk in public statistics in order to avert attempts to correlate changes in statistics with observed connections.
We cannot guarantee a perfect secrecy of the data. A resourceful attacker might obtain control of the server and intercept the requests. Furthermore, even the public data might be sufficient to make general guesses of Gentoo systems (however, it is quite possible to make such guesses even without the data).
The project is still during its early development. Goose represents the server part. There is no submission client yet, or post-processing tools for the results.