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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

"Telemetry" has come to be associated with activities that definitely qualify a product as spyware (though they've become fairly common—thanks, "data-driven" marketers).

From reading the OpenTelemetry site, that doesn't seem to be their main, stated purpose, but thefounder's post in another part of the thread leads me to think it may, in fact, see that kind of use, too.

[EDIT] damn, sorry, downvoters, for explaining the reason this is getting knee-jerk negative reactions from people, when someone expressed confusion about it. Again, I think the main reason is the word used, and what it's mostly associated with now, among some folks.

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Every tool is also a weapon, obviously. We haven't stopped making hammers because they can be used to hit people.

It's why people are making these assumptions about the term "telemetry". In certain circles it usually means spyware. One of those circles includes front-end web, which is pretty well-represented on HN.

[EDIT] and, especially, that's why they're jumping to the conclusion that github is gearing up to do more spying on its users, which is the part that I think people are bothered by, not the existence of this software package.

OpenTelemitry isn't useful for spying purposes. It just isn't. If github wanted to spy on users they have way more direct methods that don't involve collecting the time your browser executes a function or waits on an AJAX request.

Cool, that's fine, I was just explaining why it's getting that reaction from people. Telemetry means different things to different people and a (quite new) use is basically just a euphemism for "watching over people's shoulder while they use our software"—but, among some people, that's the main use they encounter, so they assumed that's what this is.

The sorts of stuff collected by opentelemitry are benign. Can it be weaponized? Of course, but that's like using a screwdriver to kill a fly. If I wanted to collect evil "telemitry" I wouldn't touch opentelemitry because it isn't useful for that.

It's like being afraid your browser profiler is being used to spy on you. Could it do that? Sure. but there are so many easier ways to accomplish the same task.

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