Ask HN: Should open-source projects allow disabling telemetry?

We just had a user submit an issue and a PR to revert the changes we made earlier that remove the option to disable telemetry. We feel like it’s a fair ask to share usage data with authors of an open-source tool that’s early in the making; but the user’s viewpoint is also perfectly understandable. Are we in the wrong here?

https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/issues/1179

Surely we aren’t the first open-source company to face this dilemma. We don’t want to alienate the community; but losing visibility of usage doesn’t sound great either. Give people the “more privacy” button and most are going to press it. Is there a happy medium?

Thanks! This is helpful. None of us at Digger have led or maintained significant OSS projects before - so discovering things as we go

You are very definitely "in the wrong".

If you want to discuss this in more depth I'll be happy to elaborate and give you ethical guidance, but presently that's probably just adding to the noise.

You should allow disabling it. The wording "allows collecting anonymised usage and debugging data" in the documentation doesn't make it clear enough that the data is send to the company servers.

YVW. I'll have a think about some other sources, especially plain speaking non-academic takes on the ethics that help developers see the issues. For now this one is a good general overview [0].

The big one with telemetry, is unintended side effects due to correlation and deanonymisation - which is actually dead hard to anticipate - very easy to get wrong like rolling your own cryptography :)

The other, around consent and defaults, is that even if your telemetry is perfectly anonymous, benign and beneficial to the end user, you may trigger a security alert and over-zealous investigation and reporting. This can have a massive impact on your reputation, as happened to Audacity. It's really not worth taking the risk.

Hope that helps.

[0] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S2398-60...