Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Are there any examples of companies making a contractually binding pledge to never use any telemetry data for anything than improving the application/service... NEVER for creating marketing profiles or for surfacing ads?

View on HN

They're not using "telemetry" as a euphemism for "shipping spyware to end users to record their actions on their own machine", in this case. This appears to be a very fancy log aggregation product that has also eaten logging/tracing related configuration deployment functionality.

It's not even that. It's the interface that other logging/tracing apis can plug into. It's the "SLF4J" of tracing/metrics gathering.

Why is this useful? Because it lets people writing libraries provide the ability for users of their libraries to track performance information without dictating to them what performance tracking tools they should use.

There is the web-packages in Javascript that creates traces for click events etc. but also the track how much time requests took on the client-side. Or render times of the UI e.g. Vue/React components

See: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/t...

In the context of this article - opentelemetry is for performance tracing on the backend. The call to the endpoint would already end up in access logs, and this would just give more detailed performance metrics on queries and function calls.

This is likely more in the realm of observability than what you’re thinking. eg metrics, logs and traces. Could you store marketing data in here? Sure, but that’s not really what opentelemetry is built for.

even if they did, that would't mean anything. They could easily construct an argument that surfacing ads serves to improve the application (with a few extra rethoric steps in between).

If a company is serious about this type of promise, they should take away their ability to change their mind in the future with a Ulysses pact[1]. See this[2] older post where for a bit more detail from a talk by Cory Doctorow.

>> The answer to not getting pressure from your bosses, your stakeholders, your investors or your members, to do the wrong thing later, when times are hard, is to take options off the table right now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411018

How would that be implemented in practice, for the case of telemetry? The data is held by a third party? Couldn't they always "buy" that third party? Is there a standard Ulysses mechanism for data compartmentalization?

It seems that, in the majority of cases, we are left with trust at the end of the day. They might say "we will never do X" but if someone buys them, then the "we" becomes something different, and the new company is free to do whatever. With github, it's that paragon of good behaviour Microsoft that controls things.

These promises need to be written down in the articles of association in a company, and I have never seen this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com