Hacker News Reader

Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what?

  It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policy

View on HN

If you are willing to trust their own documentation, there is documentation about what is sent with anonymous usage statistics in Jetbrains IDEA IDEs:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-statistic...

That said, if you mean "checked" as in checking for compliance, I don't think anonymous usage statistics are for that. For that they would need to not be anonymous. If they could identify who was improperly using the community versions, it would break the pinky promise of anonymity. (And for the record I personally doubt they are secretly correlating anonymous usage statistics, but if they were, using them for license compliance would involve either revealing that they did this or at least parallel construction.)

That all said, I think everyone will just have to form their own opinion on whether to trust their statements and whether this is acceptable.

If I had to guess, there probably isn’t any direct monitoring of commercial-ness in the IDE, but also guessing there’s Jetbrains employees watching for public statements that mention/screenshot a Jetbrains product and will contact the business if their company is not on file. Only need a few hits to make that worth while.

I have company laptop and wanted to try writing something in rust (I found this on RustRover page) but I believe this violates my company's policies. However TBH I don't believe that if data goes somewhere it cannot be deanonymised. I would be more comfortable with clear license "this is my project, you can see it and I am not using it commercially", but not with "you must allow us to send some anonymous data"

I believe IntelliJ IDEA IDEs have a 30-day trial. If you get the trial license and use that instead of the community version it should be entirely possible to never enable telemetry.

Though, I think this still requires contacting a license server (either at your company or at Jetbrains directly) so maybe that doesn't really fix the problem.

It's the dreaded T-word: telemetry. The same sort of thing people get up in arms about in Windows but JetBrains will get a pass here.

It's not hypocritical to feel different about different types of telemetry from different companies. JetBrains makes software I like using, and hasn't given me much reason to think they're being nefarious. Microsoft makes software I hate using, constantly betrays user's trust, shoves ads where they don't belong, uses dark patterns to trick people into using their services, ignores user defaults to promote their own shit, repeatedly installs software I didn't ask for, replaces working OS apps with shitty replacements that don't work and crash constantly... need I go on?

Windows exists to sell ads and Microsoft services, and no one can go anywhere because they're locked into legacy software, and Microsoft constantly abuses that position. JetBrains IDEs exist to sell themselves to businesses as a productivity tool. They benefit from making it actually good because no one is locked in and they have real competition.

Not to mention an OS has more access to my data than an IDE. If JetBrains suddenly decided they'd bundle a feature in IntelliJ where they constantly record my entire screen at all times, I'd be much more wary about their telemetry.

Its not telemetry its Microsoft + telemetry that people are up in arms over.

Catch JetBrains doing something dodgy enough and there will be a similar shitstorm against them.

Except in this case, Jetbrains lets you turn telemetry off and it stays off.

Mandating telemetry for the free version makes a lot of sense. They want to understand how people are using their software so they can improve it. Looking at how someone uses your software before they decide not to buy it seems pretty valuable.

But also I suspect Jetbrains management wants more telemetry period. They've discovered that they don't know how power users work with their software because they've all had telemetry off for years.

windows is a paid product with heavily-integrated spyware and adware

I wouldn't trust the psychos at MS to not murder their own families if it padded the bottom like a quarter of a percentage point YoY, you're comparing apples to axe murderers here.

I'm hoping it's on it's own domain and I can block it with my PiHole

I wish they would allow opt-out for people who have a subscription active on one of the other Jetbrains products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com