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Comment by brendanfalk | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! We do need to put in place a proper privacy policy. But we wanted to be transparent with how Fig uses your data (hence what we have currently).

You can run `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true` to disable all telemetry except for one daily ping.

You also make a good point: in our onboarding we should move our privacy information to before granting accessibility! We will make this more clear

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I love your concept and wish to cheer you on, but this statement

> You can run `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true` to disable all telemetry except for one daily ping.

contains such a blatant lie (disableTelemetry does _not_ disable telemetry) that I've already lost a lot of trust, in an area I am not willing to play trust games. I hope you rethink this, soon and loudly.

So what does it do? Is it just about the daily ping?

I assume they use it to track DAUs/MAUs. Otherwise, they only have data on installs, but wouldn't have visibility into user retention.

Yes, most likely. Being VC backed means they will want to be able to show pretty growth charts every few months.

Seems like they could've avoided this entirely just by having a daily check for updates to the app itself and accepting the fuzz factor.

I hear you and I agree. This is a huge oversight on our part and we will make the disableTelemetry command turn off all telemetry. This will come out in our next build

Nice! Good call. These HN posts can bring a lot of heat but it comes with extremely valuable feedback like this. For me it's too late; I've now seen that you need to be caught in the act before you'll do the right thing -- but for folks who didn't see this you'll be much better off going forward.

This seems really harsh. It's not like the guy tried to hide from you that it would still permit one daily ping. He told you straight up.

This is just unnecessarily rude. The guy had explicitly mentioned about the daily ping and it's mentioned on the product doc as well - so please don't make him up as the big bad guy who says I CAN HAZ DATA

I can't imagine that daily ping being worth the loss of trust from having a "disable telemetry" setting that doesn't really disable all telemetry. People who care about disabling telemetry will care about the daily ping, too.

Telemetry being on by default on something like this is going to be hard to pull off. Homebrew has telemetry but it's only for Homebrew commands. This would potentially be for every single command one type in a terminal. It just takes one little bug in the app and who knows what can be sent, maybe passwords and so on.

> Homebrew has telemetry but it's only for Homebrew commands.

It was also more than a little controversial.

And why I don't use the tool.

Homebrew's telemetry burned so many bridges back in the day. I had a friend who sold his week-old 15-inch MBP over that.

I think you should reconsider daily pinging still taking place when the user explicitly asks to disable telemetry.

Disable except for once a day is not actually disabling. That's pretty whack.

Please make telemetry opt in, not opt out. And please honor the disableTelemetry setting by disabling the ping.

...DNT header, but for the OS

Telemetry by default in terminal autocompletion is a pretty big turnoff for me, even if it can be disabled

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