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Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

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Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#141

Post by Juan1 »

ARussell wrote: post #24
fit2rule wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'll confess that this is a real deal breaker for me personally .. I'll be having a closer look at ports and maybe fink soon. Maybe after all its time to get off OSX and back to Linux, where these sorts of things happen less frequently ..

Maybe try out Nix while you're at it, too! I'm using NixOS, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. The standalone package manager fills the same niche as Homebrew, I think.

I only use Linux, so what do I know, but... is the highly interesting Nix package manager a full alternative to Homebrew ?

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#143

Post by SoOnThe1Hand »

hk__2 wrote: post #99
jldugger wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be somehow more ethical if they set up their own piwik instance to collect the same data?

We don’t have the resources for this. If you have any suggestion for a service that doesn’t require us time to manage we’d be very grateful. Homebrew have a dozen maintainers for >30 PRs & issues per day plus maintaining our own CI infrastructure plus normal development; and all of this is on our spare time.

So the project is short-handed, but wants to take on scouring analytics to start packaging common things people are doing with the software.

If you're too busy to do this "right" why bother? Are you hoping making more shortcuts will increase adoption?

Current employer doesn't much care about these things, but last employer did. Having shared this thread with their IT folks, they've decided to cut people off from homebrew while they figure it out.

I guess costing yourself users is one way to free up some time.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#144

Post by hk__2 »

jsmeaton wrote: post #112
hk__2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew maintainer here. Remember that we didn’t put these analytics in place to get rich or get free beer at the local pub. Screwing up the stats won’t help anyone. We currently don’t have any overview of our userbase; we don’t even know how many people use Homebrew. More importantly, Homebrew currently only bottles the default options but we know some people use some options that cause the formulae to build from s…

I'll leave analytics turned on, but the blog post says it'll strip arguments. Your example above seems to conflict with what the post says, no?

Yeah it’s not implemented yet. We’re doing it incrementally and actually started shipping the first bits one month ago (but it was opt-in for tests). Bottling the most used options is something we’re really excited both as maintainers and users and is IMO the number 1 reason these analytics will benefit everyone. We’re currently looking how it behaves and will add them soon.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#146

Post by FussyZeus »

I love the knee-jerk hostile reactions to any sort of phoning home by an application. They've provided extensive explanations on what is collected, why they're collecting it, who has access, what it's for, and even the code that does the actual collecting and it still isn't enough for people.

While I'm against this type of thing typically, this information is exactly what someone who is concerned about it needs to see, and if they don't want to be involved they include the opt-out on the very same page. I don't see how this could get any better, this could be held up as a gold standard for Microsoft and Google moving forward.

This type of data is invaluable to developers, I can't tell you how frustrating it is that so many people now refuse to share it because of overblown privacy concerns. The data is anonymized and no one cares enough about what you're doing to de-anonymize it.

There are real threats to your privacy out there and spending time on stuff like this just adds to the noise.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#147

Post by dublinben »

jalami wrote: post #126

Would really prefer it to be opt-in instead of opt-out as others have said. Sharing the info with Homebrew is one thing, the GA borg-malware is another entirely. Something like that should require an explicit request. At least in the browser, I can blacklist all requests with uBlock. Atom does the same thing and I'm not a fan. You have to explicitly remove the analytics 'package'. Soon every piece of software will be…

>Soon every piece of software will be reporting, silently.

Not ethically written, free software. You would never see this behavior from a GNU program.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#148

Post by Spivak »

azag0 wrote: post #105
binaryanomaly wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the company that offers the service? There's traces , ips, etc. everywhere, not impossible to correlate...

1) Homebrew is not a company. 2) It's open source.

1) Google the company. 2) GA is not open source nor does it matter when it's your data on someone else's server.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#149

Post by derefr »

mikevm wrote: post #4
LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

Set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 to opt out. The right thing to do would be to make it opt in, not opt out. (Which would not be without precedent. Debian's popcon is opt-in.)

That's probably true, but then no one would opt-in.

Or, even worse, there'd be a selection effect where the distribution of people who opt in is skewed from the total distribution of Homebrew users, ruining the dataset for any analysis one might want to do to it. There's a reason that Nielson Ratings collection isn't opt-in.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#150

Post by toomuchtodo »

Spivak wrote: post #148
azag0 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Homebrew is not a company. 2) It's open source.

1) Google the company. 2) GA is not open source nor does it matter when it's your data on someone else's server.

What makes you trust Homebrew over Google? What makes you trust anyone with your data online?
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