New Feature - Control Device Data Collection

Kolide’s Inventory feature is designed to collect, enrich, and visualize important data from enrolled devices. We built it to preemptively answer many essential questions administrators have about their devices that Osquery is well suited to answer.

Before adding new device properties to Inventory, we discuss their utility and privacy implications internally and proceed accordingly. Unfortunately, if our customers felt differently about these decisions in the past, they had little recourse to customize further what data was collected. 

After writing the “collecting data honestly” section in honest.security, we knew we had to do better. To that end, we are proud to announce new features that enable Kolide administrators to more finely control what data is collected and displayed within Inventory and the features that rely on it.

For instance, let’s say you don’t really want Kolide to enumerate the Chrome Extensions your users install. You can now browse to the Chrome Extensions section in Inventory and select Disable Device Property.

Since Inventory is the source of truth for many features in Kolide, like widgets and checks, a modal will appear, which will advise you on precisely which features of Kolide might be impacted, allowing you to make a value-driven decision around the collection of any particular category of data.

Besides providing opt-out capabilities, this feature will also allow Kolide to ship new Inventory device properties that require explicit opt-in from an administrator. Starting today, we support  ARP Cache as our first opt-in Inventory property.

Privacy Center

As part of our efforts to increase transparency to end-users, we have overhauled the UI of the Privacy Center and included a list of the data collected from devices.

Wrapping Up

We are excited for our privacy-minded customers to take advantage of this feature and truly customize the data collection to a level they and their end-users feel comfortable with.

If you are interested in using it, we encourage you to read our Help Center guide before diving in, as it contains more information than we could possibly fit in this announcement post.