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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

It seems reasonable to want some analytics and it looks like they did a good job from a privacy standpoint (random IDs that you can even change if you wish). They even allow you to opt-out. There is simply no betrayal here.

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Opt-In by default is wrong, regardless of the intention.

It very much depends on the thing you're opting into or out of. For example, a better default for organ donation has saved lots of lives: https://sparq.stanford.edu/solutions/opt-out-policies-increa...

I can't agree with that, even if the results are good. And for the record, I am an organ donor.

The point is, opt-out is the problem.

Why is that a problem? If you are the type of person that is paranoid about anonymous usage data you will be very well versed in opting out of things because that's pretty much the standard. Homebrew is even notifying users that they are starting analytics and that you can opt-out. Here's what I just got on my terminal:

   ==> Homebrew has enabled anonymous aggregate user behaviour analytics
   Read the analytics documentation (and how to opt-out) here:
     https://git.io/brew-analytics

The vast majority of users want Homebrew to work better and are fine with the developers knowing which packages are the most popular. This is not "betrayal".

My thoughts exactly

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