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Comment by n0n0n4t0r | Hacker News Reader

Enabling by default this setting is quite annoying from the point of view of the user... But, from the point of view of the software developer, the choice is not so easy: You decide to either be totally blind on the usage of your software or you jump into the exact situation they are in in this comment thread: piss of people.

At least they choose to let us opt out easily, no?

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I think it's more about the naming. OptIn doesn't really suggest that it would be true by default. It being named telemetry.optOut and being set to false by default would make more sense.

Or, how about: telemetry.enabled?

What about if you would just... ask? I usually allow sending telemetry back if I'm asked nicely and the reason is explained well.

> At least they choose to let us opt out easily, no?

Everybody does. Even MS and Google tools. I would say it's the bare minimum.

IIRC you can't opt out completely from sending telemetry in Windows. Your choices are "basic" and "full", or something similar.

Ah, right, hadn't thought of Windows, I was thinking about dotnet and other MS (open source) cli stuff I read about.

Opt out via environment variables (like dotnet requires) is hardly "easy" and it's quite fragile.

Exactly. As in many cases in life, "Criticism is easy, and art is difficult." :)

Cough, is this even legal under GDPR?

There is no personal information, only an anonymous identifier and usage information of a specific tool only, so GDPR doesn't come into play.

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