Accidental Privacy: Dell’s Linux Assistant Fails to Phone Home

Many users choose Linux for reasons of control, transparency, and privacy. So it's worth paying attention when software quietly undermines those principles.


Recently, I discovered that Dell’s Linux Assistant for Ubuntu contains built-in telemetry code,  code intended to log and send metrics about user behavior. The kicker? It fails silently due to a minor Python bug. The result is what you might call an accidental privacy enhancement.

Hidden Telemetry

Dell’s Linux Assistant is supposed to make life easier for Ubuntu users running Dell hardware. It manages drivers, firmware, and support tools. Nowhere in the user interface or documentation does it mention telemetry.

Yet, digging into its code  or, in my case, encountering a stack trace reveals that it tries to log an event when the user closes the app:

QueueMessageClient(...).LogLogMetricEvent("FRONTEND", "Dell Linux Assistant closes")

This function uses a scheduler to send telemetry data: usage logs, likely meant to be analyzed back at Dell.

The Bug That Breaks It

However, the telemetry fails due to a small but critical coding oversight. The Python stack trace shows this line:

self._thread.isAlive()

The isAlive() method was deprecated and later removed in Python 3.9, replaced by is_alive(). As a result, the telemetry mechanism crashes before sending any data.

There’s no error shown to the user. No pop-up. No log entry unless you're watching the terminal. The system just... doesn’t report anything.

A Win for Privacy (For Now)

From a privacy standpoint, this failure is oddly welcome. Telemetry is often bundled into modern software, but rarely is it disabled this easily — and accidentally.

It’s a curious scenario: the presence of telemetry without the functionality of telemetry. The code is there, but the data never leaves your machine.

This raises a few questions:

  • How many other systems quietly fail to phone home?
  • Do vendors even realize their telemetry is broken?
  • Should users be made aware when telemetry is attempted, regardless of success?

A Quiet Workaround

Advanced users might even choose to leave the telemetry code in place, knowing it’s broken, effectively disabling tracking without removing or blocking anything. This “fail-quiet” approach could be preferable to invasive firewall rules or breaking package dependencies by stripping out telemetry code manually.

Final Thoughts

In a time when even open-source platforms aren’t immune to data collection, this kind of accidental failure is oddly reassuring — a glitch that grants the user a bit more privacy, whether by luck or neglect.

It also underlines a bigger point: if privacy really matters, users shouldn't have to rely on bugs to protect it.

Have you found similar quiet failures in Linux or open-source telemetry systems? I’d love to hear them — especially if they lead to interesting questions about software trust.

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