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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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