Aha! Thanks, arochester!
popularity-contest
, as barbaric as the Microsoft Telemetry Gargantua (which applies also to VSCode, by the way...) or as the Google Supermassive Black Hole (if we use Android).. . .
Which doesn't excuse them of clearly show or link the privacy policies. The only concern, as said, can be solved by reading the privacy policy, specifically for telemetry stuff. If at AutoTux they don't make it easy by providing that info, very bad of them, and beware, yes, but preinstalling a Microsoft opensource package, today, doesn't mean anything as it would do 10 or 15 years ago.
And this applies to absolutely any software, without exception: don't assume that a piece of software would be fair to you just because its license is GPL. A software license doesn't even talk about what the software provider would want your data for.
It sounds as if that could very well be the case. The email address I originally saw was from the domain fifthhorseman (dot) something. Thanks for the update, @gvisoc !. . .
That "quality", the fact that the ISO is downloaded from the domain itself instead from the usual AWS region or from GitHub, the lack of a SHA256 or similar to check the integrity, a bit of a research over the name of the author and the fact that his email is a GMail one, and not one from an educational institution... all that makes me think that this is more the case of a student or former student experimenting with Linux, FAI and his classmates...