The current KDE Plasma has telemetry included, but off by default.

However, even when "off" it still logs information (seemingly related to a nag screen that will appear to say "please let us spy on you" at some point).

Supposedly, the entire system (kuserfeedback) is optional and can be removed, but in Debian Bullseye it has been packaged as a hard dependency - removing libkuserfeedbackcore1 would remove most of KDE Plasma with it.

Is there a way to change that (e.g. by editing relevant package files from "Depends" to "Recommends"), or is it something that requires compiling from source?

I would first ask around and see if it's harmful as you think.

It may be an erronous message, after all.

No point in a chase if they were honest and just didn't fix the printf output.

Another way would be to review the code on Git - see where the code prints that messge. (though, that could fool you if the "off" option effects code before and after - which is the code you want to know of)

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I agree that Kuserfeedback is unacceptable!
Actually, it behaves like spyware.

Even if KDE doesn't spy on you (but can you trust their word?), you don't want Kuserfeedback to follow your every move!
What if your computer falls in the wrong hands?

Does someone knows, where the spyware data are saved? Maybe you can delete them, on a regular basis.

The answer is the latter.

Removing the core kuserfeedback telemetry package breaks Plasma desktop (it logs in to a blank screen) until it is returned - to actually disable it requires changing a flag when compiling each of the packages that use it. (Which according to one KDE contributor makes it a distro's choice, not a KDE bug.)

It should not be necessary to change compile time flags in order to fully disable such logging, but KDE have chosen to implement it in that way.

Given how tedious recompiling KDE Plasma would be, not to mention monitoring for other software that chooses to use the framework, next step is to figure out if there's a way to gut kuserfeedback's library files, so it appears to be there but is actually an inert stub/mock object.

I considered a frequent cron job to delete files, but it already currently creates files in both ~/.config/kde.org and ~/.config/KDE - see results of "find ~ -name 'UserFeedback*'" - and I don't know if it's guaranteed that prefix will continue to be used (or maybe there's already other locations I'm unaware of).

Hence why next option is to figure out if the functionality can be disabled without breaking the desktop, which probably means compiling a replacement libKUserFeedbackCore.so file.

As usual quick* searches e.g: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comment...m_content=PSR1
Did you view the readme file? Along with KDE it's not a tinfoil hat, tho you can completely encrypt the whole system. What you don't mind systemD? 🥫🪱🤣