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Comment by michlim | Hacker News Reader

Warp engineer here. I understand your concern.

We will remove telemetry when we enter general availability. It will be opt-in and anonymous.

We really want to improve the product quickly during this beta phase. Collecting data makes it much easier to reach out and get feedback when something goes wrong. But we only track metadata, never console output. For an exhaustive list of events that we track, see here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel....

We are going to open source parts and potentially all of the terminal. We want to allow folks to audit our code and tweak Warp.

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I think I'll reserve judgment for when Warp puts its GitHub repository where its canned HN comment is.

If you want to be taken seriously as a security and privacy focused product that can be trusted to handle sensitive data and undertake sensitive operations, this is not a great look. We need to trust you now and be able to trust you today - before general availability. The world of software is littered with "potentially" and "later" statements that somehow never quite manage to arrive.

I hope you can understand our collective skepticism. Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. It starts with making it easy to trust you by minimizing how much we have to.

This type of canned response doesn't sit well with me. Keep us posted when you're out of beta and those things are removed, do you have a timeline for that?

We potentially could remove the telemetry sooner, before the general availability. There is no set timeline yet, but we will announce it when we do!

you need to realise is that if you don't do this "by tomorrow", the momentum will be lost and no HN'er will ever use your product, because they will forever associate it with tracking

You grossly overestimate how important HN is. Didn't Dropbox get beaten up on HN?

this isn't Dropbox though

terminals are used by sysadmins/software developers/hackers

HN the most important resource in this category

their product has the hotspot

they should be fixing the telemetry ASAP (i'd suggest - before next release) or else their product will be forgotten for a while and next time it comes up everyone will be sceptical to upvote again

There are 1000s of developers who use the terminal for simple things like running dev workflows - git checkout, build, edit code, send a PR, etc. It seems wrap is trying automate things here to help these developers.

Just because there are plenty of bash wizards who don't like this, it doesn't mean this isn't useful.

There are still plenty of users who swear by Vim / Emacs. I've been a software engineer for 10 years at a FAANG and never use Vim to write code.

This is already being brought up in multiple slack networks I'm on, with the general consensus being that these decisions make the company impossible to trust.

rust's rustup planned to add telemetry - they had a config for it (but never ended up doing so). It still affected me and how I viewed the program. These things stick around. I think they are safely without telemetry now (but they "obviously" ping home to look for updates).

You really should take people's advice in beta. Get rid of telemetry before tomorrow. If you don't this terminal will likely fail. It might be too late already.

I totally get your perspective, and I'd do the same thing… but only before launching on HN. If you want feedback from the hacking public, you have to accept that it'll be inefficient.

For myself, the visuals are compelling enough that my fingers twitched over "download" but the "you'll have to log in to your terminal" messaging I see here was enough for me to not, and even though I could theoretically do it later, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that (rationally or no) will probably hold me back from trying it once it's GA.

You do understand that developers use the terminal with very sensitive information? Things like SSH keys, proprietary code (for vim users), Bitcoin private keys, etc...

These cover both professional (company) and personal stuff. No one should use a terminal that has telemetry (unless they are out of their mind).

your target audience will never opt-in though

> never console output.

Hopefully also not input ;)

Do you track input during beta?

No, we do not track console input or output. Just metadata like: "block copied", "block selected", "bootstrapping failed".

For an exhaustive list of events and metadata we collect, see: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...

Metadata like that, associated with a specific users identity.

We're too lazy to read over that list. Bye.

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