If it's undisclosed or it can't be disabled, then yes. It's even better if you have to enable it rather than disable it.
Updates for OSS is also often installed via a package manager so additional checks are less useful and generally unwanted. That leaves non-package distribution (e.g. Windows or portable binaries) - I think best would be to either ask during installation or ask once if the local clock is quite a bit past the release date of the current version.
Of course different people will have different opions on this.
If you want to push updates faster than Debian stable does, the proper way to do it is to provide a third-party APT repository. Then I can decide to disclose my IP to a mirror of my choice, using a proxy of my choice, that can be configured globally in /etc/apt.
An IP address alone may not reveal who had visited a site. However, Internet Service Providers have additional data that can link IP addresses to individual people. Although it's unlikely that the two data sets will ever be matched up, it is possible. So IP addresses must be treated as personal data.
You can make up your own interpretations of the law as much as you want, but in real life the interpretation from the CJEU (for US readers like me, the EU's equivalent of the Supreme Court) is the one that matters.
But as others already said: if you don’t store the IP (eg in logs) it should be fine.
It would be illegal specifically if you _collected and stored_ the IP address information from the phone home requests to process in some form later.
If you simply process the web request, and don't store the IP address then there it no issue.
If you do end up storing IP address in a log somewhere, then simply having the logs deleted in a documented and reasonable timeframe will be enough.
"Documented and reasonable timeframe" is intentionally vague since business requirements are varied, but if you can justify whatever you come up with, then there is no issue.
Simply do not hold onto user data for longer that what is required for the purposes of the user request. That's it.
From what I've learned about EU regulations, ANY time you have technology that serves an EU citizen there is the potential for you to be sued over potential violations of the intentionally overreaching and vague privacy laws. The EU is so incredibly hostile to small business and FOSS.
It's not EU being hostile, but rather US being incredibly lax(to put it mildly) about privacy issues, so that we even consider these violations a norm.
Running a service that might serve an EU citizen quickly escalates to involving lawyers and performing risk analysis in relation to being sued in a court across the ocean.
Running any service where you are not sure of legal requirements might require consulting a lawyer first, how is it unique to GDPR? And in order to be on the radar for GDPR violations as a small business you REALLY need to do something seriously wrong.
I've always believed GDPR was a regulation that crossed borders. Meaning it applies to any EU citizen, no matter where they are located, which is what made this unique (being that it's not my countries laws). But:
> The GDPR applies to: > > a company established outside the EU and is offering goods/services (paid or for free) or is monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU.
from https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
So now I'm wondering if an IP address reverse-geo lookup to block IPs in the EU is the easy way out for many online services, presuming that this doesn't cause compliance issues for EU users using a VPN.
"Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies: [..] processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data"
Reasonable abuse protection clearly falls under that, as has been fairly clearly stated even in the GDPR itself: https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-49/
How long can the IP kept around for? And in what form? If it lands in a database, does it need to be encrypted at rest? Can it just be hashed? Salted, too? Do I need to rotate the salt? This limits the ability to protect the service though. Are the tools in my stack logging something somewhere else I don't know about? Could I get in trouble if it is? Cloudflare forwards IP-derived data to me, like the city of IP may be in, do I have to be concerned with that as well? Do I have to tell users upfront that I use Cloudflare and it derives data? I'm guessing I have to fully understand what CLoudflare does with this data. It eventually hits my Digital Ocean droplet, what does it log?, are there separate logs I can access from them outside my droplet? Certainly they have logs, too, what do I do about that? If I just require all users to explicitly agree to some form of data collection this probably goes away. Oh wait, now I have to manage obvious PII and ensure Right to be Forgotten can be exercised in a timely fashion, I've just made the whole thing more difficult for myself.
There is a cost, and it affect the small honest devs the most.
I'm not saying what GDPR is attempting to do is a bad thing, I'm just saying that it is not easy to comply like everyone keeps saying.
You have to be sure that you or anyone else in your chain can't link an IP to a specific person without explicit consent (and thus compliant with the rest of the regulation).
You can have cloudflare giving you IP/location pairs as long as cloudflare doesn't know who that person is.
You can keep your own logs of IP/person. You have to keep it safe, and inform somewhere in a policy that you are doing that. If the logs are kept abroad or cloud, then you need consent (and comply with the rest of the regulation).
It's all made to avoid companies tracking using across boundaries, selling data and having all that PII unwarranted for the next "We take your data and security very seriously" blog post about a leak.
It's easier not to keep any PII around. IPs? you can have as many as you want as long it can't be used to identify a person (without consent).
PS: here is a checklist => https://gdpr.eu/checklist/