FAQ Friday

No, it doesn’t. Even though Oxide is referred to as a cloud computer, it doesn’t send any data back to Oxide. Now you can run a packet trace yourself, and you would just see the sweet, sweet whispers of BGP. And I honestly could end this post right here, right now, and that’s all for FAQ Friday.

But I want to unpack this more, so let’s dive in.

First I want to cover what does "phone home" even mean? Phoning home is when a product sends data back to its company’s servers, and that data can be used for beneficial use cases, such as collecting telemetry information or product activation. But it can also be used for malicious use cases such as spyware and tracking users.

Oxide doesn’t do any phone home at all.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Does Oxide collect any telemetry data? Well, yes we do, but it’s stored on the rack and never leaves the rack, and it’s there to power our metrics APIs and our dashboards such as CPU, RAM and disk usage, not to track users or any other malicious use case.

But there are a subset of prospects and customers that have approached Oxide and said,

We’re amenable to something like that at Oxide, but we have no plans to support that at this moment. But these conversations do come up and it shows that the concept of a phone home isn’t always bad. And of course, much like everything we do at Oxide, it would have to be open source and opt-in.

So if the idea of a privacy-respecting on-premises cloud computer is interesting to you, head to our website where you can try Oxide for yourself and see if it meets your enterprise’s needs today.