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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

I can totally see the benefits of telemetry. But it would be way less phishy if it were opt-in, or at least opt-out with a very visible information message.

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The problem with this is, do you want every program you ever use, to start prompting you with a series of questions about various opt-in / opt-out questions? I get annoyed enough that gnu parallel keeps asking me about citing it, and that's one program.

    Bash would like to record analyitics. y/n/more information
    > y
    > ls *.c
    ls would like to record information about how you use it.
    y/n/more information.
    > y
    file1.c file2.c file3.c
    > grep 'string' *.c
    grep would like to record some information about your
    usage. y/n/more information.
    > y
    file1.c:8: string
    > vim file1.c
    vim would like to record information usage, to help
    improve vim in future. y/n/more information.
    > y
    The 'C' package in vim would like to ...

No, I want every program I ever use not to leak data about me all over the internet.

I'm amazed we're even having this discussion

If I saw something like that, I'd format my drive and install another OS.

The very idea of your shell or file listing program sending analytics to the mothership is ridiculous. They shouldn't be even talking to a network directly. They have a set of well-defined tasks, and spying on you is not one of them.

"The problem with this is, do you want every program you ever use, to start prompting you with a series of questions about various opt-in / opt-out questions?"

Simple answer, Yes.

It would lead to conversations about the elephant in the room. It also alleviates the assumption I trust all providers(comprehend the EULA/ToS) and puts their actions under scrutiny. If more people realized what data is collected and by whom for whom they could make an informed, cost/benefit choice. Other useful results are, what is the applicability of that data to the project, what characteristics define the 'Trusted Partners' that data is shared with and, possibly, inject some restraint into the collectors' decisions of what to collect.

edit: removed unintended paste fragment

Lol, reminds me of what macOS did[1] to me after a recent upgrade:

  $ git pull

  (long wait)

  ^c

  $ git pull

  (got distracted and had to leave keyboard for a bit)

  Can't execute program until you accept xcode license

I couldn't believe it.

1. paraphrasing the words

Opt-in can be implemented other way without questions. For example, user could set an environment variable or type a command.

Then we hit the problem that if we don't push that request at users, probably a tiny fraction will turn it on.

Worse, that fraction will be the statistically unusual people who bother reading and finding such options, meaning we can't derive any statistically useful results about the user base from them!

Frankly, that's your problem. I don't see even a true desire to make the software better as a legitimate reason to exfiltrate data from people without asking.

Maybe you should ask them better. For example you could ask for help on the home page of your project or in the beginning of a tutorial. Or maybe they do not want to paticipate. Is it right to ignore this and turn analytics on by default?

The Debian installer gets this right: it prompts you during the install whether it can collect information about installed packages for popcon[1]

[1] http://popcon.debian.org/

I never understood why popcon is necessary. Couldn't you achieve about the same result by just counting downloads on the package mirrors?

Oh, no!

Opt-out is what commecrial companies do because they do not respect their users' privacy. Free open source software should do the opposite.

By the way I think that browser history should be disabled by default too.

Browser history is useful to user (but maybe the access to it could be restricted by means of authentication). I'm fine with off-line browser history that's accessible only to the user (and not JS running on a website). But sending any of it over the wire should definitely be opt-in.

An unexperienced user might not know that the history is recorded and later can be accidently seen for example by other member of the family. A good software would not allow that.

I remember some IM app for linux had history turned off by default. I was really surprised then.

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