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Comment by Hackbraten | Hacker News Reader

> We destroyed (and did not migrate/back up) all of Homebrew’s Google Analytics data on 2023-06-16 and all Google Analytics code has been removed.

Glad to read that.

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They should not have collected that data in the first place.

If you're new to Homebrew, make sure to set the environment variable HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS to 1 before downloading and installing it. Otherwise, it defaults to spying on you.

https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics

It was probably useful for running a massive global software distribution solution.

Yeah I don't understand that logic. How do you improve or even know what's going on with the service if you have no analytics?

Opt-in would still allow for that.

Can you explain to us all why reducing the data you gather to a self-selecting 0.1% of users would still allow for it being useful?

Can you explain why monitoring user-specific behavior and reporting that to unknown, foreign locations outside of your jurisdiction (for most people) should be allowed in the first place?

It is systems monitoring, not user behavior. This is allowed as per the GDPR, and morally uncomplicated.

That's not relevant. In scientific research involving people, participant recruiting and informed consent is the norm, and those studies lead to ground-breaking, life-saving research. Anything other than informed consent is unethical. Opt-out telemetry isn't ok when a large corporation does it, and it isn't ok when a free/libre/open source software project does it. That the Homebrew devs feel the need to spy on all their users in order to get statistically meaningful data means they probably don't know how to properly conduct a research study, too.

Ok, I’ll let the homebrew maintainers that you don’t fund and never will that they just need to launch expensive, labour and time intensive opt-in studies of user behavior modeled after totally comparable clinical trials to understand how the system you’re utilizing for free is used in the real world!

Thanks, this has been super useful. I’m sure the maintainers will be relived.

Why is simply asking permission controversial?

If the implication is that what you’re doing would be rejected by 99,9% of users if they were asked, then you should reconsider either what you’re doing, or how you’re presenting it to them.

Opt-in can boil down to a simple non defaulted choice during installation.

No one is denying utility. Warrantless searches and govt surveillance is useful, few people want them.

Note: Homebrew links to this which tells you how to opt-out before sending any analytics data. Similarly, Homebrew sends no PII and you can trivially view all the data that's being sent and verify this yourself. As a result, I think "spying" is unnecessarily inflammatory language. We wouldn't have these analytics if we didn't need them to run the project.

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