A lot of people asked me to write this article, so here is my attempt at writing it. Lots of people have lots of reasons to dislike systemd, and a lot of them wonder if there is also a privacy reason to dislike systemd. But I have not ever heard of any kind of telemetry, phoning home, or any other kind of spyware in the systemd software suite. systemd is free software so anyone can look at the code. And a lot of people have spent a lot of time cataloging why they don't like systemd. But if you read their reasons, none of them mention any kind of spyware hiding inside of systemd's codebase that can be actually proven. So, I can't write that systemd is spyware until someone can prove that it is spyware. If you have proof then feel free to email me and I will be happy to change this rating.
This line of reasoning for giving systemd a "Not Spyware" rating has some flaws, and the most obvious one is that it isn't reasonable to audit the 1 million lines of systemd code for spyware. But this is still too generic of a criticism to make about it, because while in theory it is true, there needs to be real proof. Maybe the take-away is that while there are many reasons to not like systemd, it's really probably not violating anyone's privacy, just because of how much scrutiny it has gotten. Maybe it should be rated "Potential Spyware" or a lower, "Probably Not Spyware"? I think that the rating should be taken with a grain of salt because of this.
I have personally never used systemd and I don't have the skills to actually audit it or run tests on it myself. So this isn't a very good place to look when looking for reasons to dislike systemd. At the very least, I can point to anti-systemd web pages that I am sure would be the first to report on systemd potentially violating the privacy of its users. But I don't want to call them "sources" or anything because what they talk about is beyond the scope of this website.
systemd is the best example of Suck.
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Arguments against systemd
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Is systemd an NSA attempt?
This article was last edited on 8/7/2018
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