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Comment by zakk | Hacker News Reader

First of all, let me say I appreciate your response and your work on Homebrew, a great piece of software, and quite a blessing for Mac users.

> No-one else provides anywhere near the same scale for free.

That's a bit naive. Google is not a charity and provides that service by making a profit out of user data.

> We don't send any personally identifiable information to Google. You are tracked by a randomly generated UUID (which you can regenerate at any time) and we tell Google to not store IP addresses.

Even with no IP, Google can easily cross-references searches and the random UUID, since a typical use case is that a user installs something through Homebrew after Googling it.

Please rethink this bad default choice. And sorry if my reply sounds harsh, but I think that Google tracking by default is an extremely bad choice for your users.

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> That's a bit naive. Google is not a charity and provides that service by making a profit out of user data.

Yep and that's an acceptable trade-off for the maintainers of Homebrew given that we need analytics to do our (volunteer, free-time) job adequately and we do not have financial resources for other alternatives. If you're willing to provide those financial resources indefinitely: get in touch.

> Even with no IP, Google can easily cross-references searches and the random UUID, since a typical use case is that a user installs something through Homebrew after Googling it.

That may be technically possible but I see no evidence that it is the case.

> Please rethink this bad default choice. And sorry if my reply sounds harsh, but I think that Google tracking by default is an extremely bad choice for your users.

We disagree. Please consider another macOS package manager. MacPorts is a good alternative.

I also use Google Analytics for tracking usage in my desktop applications (opt out) and it's great. I think most just think about web stats (page views) but I just use the event system. This allows me to identify unused features or possible confusing UX. I also started using it in a project at work and the data has been extremely useful.

> That's a bit naive. Google is not a charity and provides that service by making a profit out of user data.

So what if they make profit -- they provide a fantastic service that actually works well, and it allows homebrew (and many other systems) to continue to provide it's services for free.

If you are fine with a company profiting out of your personal information and habits, I am not, and I think is a reasonable choice to assume that people are not fine with that.

Then those people won't use Homebrew.

Sure! But the telemetry is a default setting, and the implications for the user’s privacy are not clear at all.

Opt-in telemetry clearly stating that Google will record the first three bytes of your IP? I’m OK with that!

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