Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 329 posts

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#261

Post by cat-dev-null »

speeder wrote: post #234
cat-dev-null wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please leave it like countries with good organ donation opt-out policies. Speaking of which, become an organ donor if you live in an opt-in country.

Like in Brazil, where there are real cases of people convicted of murdering donors to sell their organs to rich people?

Third-world country edge-cases. Murder is still murder. The preponderance of donations in first-world countries saves lives, but is so rarely done despite the pressing demand. When you or family member needs a life-saving transplant, which system would you want?

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#262

Post by cat-dev-null »

sqldba wrote: post #240
cat-dev-null wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opt-in, like optional security, rarely gets used.

That's not a user problem.

It most certainly is if support is focused on the wrong packages and features because they don't have the data to make informed decisions.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#263

Post by calgoo »

atmosx wrote: post #58
LeoPanthera wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is an alert displayed to the user the first time it tries to send info to Google? If not, that is far from "transparent". It's good that they tell you how to opt out on the website, but I can't remember the last time I went to the website. Probably when I first installed Homebrew on this Mac.

Get littlesnitch on Mac and you won't need to rely on third parties alerting about outgoing connections, although I recon the when we're talking about something like homebrew it's not easy to vet every single outgoing connection. Still littlesnitch is really awesome for the privacy conscious users.

I block the google analytics at DNS level at home. However, don't use a Google product such as Chrome as it will totally ignore your DNS settings. There is also an issue of some webpages not loading because its waiting for google analytics to finish loading. So I normally re-direct the data to an internal server in my net that captures all the traffic, which will allow the server to finish loading (also allows me to replace image Ads with Jolly Rogers images).

The issue with this is that the DNS settings only apply at home. And most mobile devices totally ignores the DNS settings as well, using the one provided my my carrier instead.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#264

Post by sneak »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #193

I'm the maintainer who added this. I apologise for the poor communication. I would have responded sooner but I've been on a plane for the last 10 hours. I'd hoped the documentation would have made clear our reasons for doing this but I feel the discomfort so since getting off my flight I've opened and merged three PRs ( https://github.com/Homebrew/install/pull/42 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/143 https://gith…

Why are you even collecting this information? Homebrew isn't some for-profit product trying to optimize its funnel.

Keep doing what you were doing. You were doing a great job. There is no benefit to you or us to silently spy on us.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#265

Post by sneak »

erpellan wrote: post #173
Touche wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Google Analytics is a network of companies that has agreed to privately collection information about users without their permission or even knowledge. It is malware that should not be included in Homebrew. The only ethical decision we can make as developers is not to use it.

Indeed! Feel free to demand a refund or refer to the contract you signed... Nobody's forcing anyone to use it.

The usage license we agreed to means we can fork it and remove this nonsense spyware.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#266

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway160303 wrote: post #214
PavlovsCat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a decision that should be up to the user , not the webmaster. This may be a dumb example, but if I get someone (I don't know very well) a glass of water from the kitchen, I won't take a little sip from it on the way. Yes, they might not care, and it's super unlikely that I would infect them with anything. But it's still not my call, and you only need to see someone not get something so basic once to lose a…

If enough users disagree with that, let them take over maintenance of homebrew. But nobody actually cares that much, only enough to complain. At length.

[deleted]

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#267

Post by agounaris »

People have all of their traffic tracked by their ISPs, they use chrome, they have full activated accounts on their phones, they add tag themselves everywhere around facebook and they are mad because someone wants statistics over google analytics... you IT people need to relax... I'm sure someone will find a way to bring up inequality, sexism, racism and being vegan at some point on the thread.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#268

Post by TheLogothete »

stephenr wrote: post #258
TheLogothete wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is GA abusive? The webmaster has to explicitly permit data sharing with google. That is, the webmaster is asked if s/he wants to share data with google and the options are unchecked by default. GA prohibits the use of personally identifiable information. Additionally the webmaster can tell google to not store IP info, which the webmaster has chosen to this in this case.

> The webmaster has to explicitly permit data sharing with google. Abusive to users . Google's whole reason for offering free analytics is to build better advertising profiles. > Additionally the webmaster can chose to not send IP info to google, I must have missed the memo where Google invented a way to make HTTP connections with no client IP.

This has gone full circle and honestly is quite irritating at this point.

People say that Google uses GA data for advertising, I say that this is not the case and then you just chose to ignore that. So I'm just gonna ask directly - can you show some evidence suggesting Google uses GA data for building advertising profiles or did you pull this opinion out of your ass?

Because as someone who analyses marketing and advertising data, I can tell you that I strongly believe they do not use GA data in this way. 1) They have no need to, they have better data; 2) This data is unreliable; 3) GA prohibits the use of personally identifiable information; and most important of all:

THE WEBMASTER CAN CHOSE TO NOT SHARE IT WITH THEM. If this webmaster went out of his way to tell google not to store IP information, I think it is pretty safe to assume that they did not opt-in to share the data with google AT ALL.

Apart from these technical reasons, using GA data in the way you think they do opens a regulatory risk of EPIC proportions.

But if you have some evidence to suggest that they do use it for "advertising profiles", please do share it. But if you can't and you formed this opinion because you are prejudiced, I would like to see you admitting it.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#269

Post by petrikapu »

petrikapu wrote: post #142

Tonight I'm going to read about pkgsrc and tomorrow give a try. It has active community last time I used it few years ago. Seems to have also binaries available at http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/

  My quick notes on how to get started with pkgsrc
  
  More info:	http://pkgsrc.org/
  			http://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/pkgsrc_64bit_osx/
  			
  # Download pkgsrc
  curl -O https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/stable/pkgsrc.tar.bz2
  # validate shasum
  $ curl -O https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/stable/pkgsrc.tar.bz2.SHA1
  $ cat pkgsrc.tar.bz2.SHA1
  $ shasum pkgsrc.tar.bz2
  # extract pkgsrc archive. Mine lives at ~/Work and I also install built packages under Work.
  $ tar jxvf pkgsrc.tar.bz2
  # bootstrap
  $ cd pkgsrc/bootstrap
  $ ./bootstrap --abi=64 --prefer-pkgsrc=yes --unprivileged --compiler=clang --prefix="$HOME/Work/pkg"
  # append prefix/bin to your PATH
  $ cat ~/.bash_profile
  export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/Work/pkg/bin"
  # re-login to make PATH effective
  # Example build of dos2unix (poor example because lots of dependencies like perl...)
  $ cd pkgsrc/converters/dos2unix/
  $ bmake install
  ...
  ===> Installing binary package of dos2unix-7.3.3
  
  $ file ~/Work/pkg/bin/dos2unix
  /Users/petri/Work/pkg/bin/dos2unix: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#270

Post by petrikapu »

petrikapu wrote: post #269
petrikapu wrote: post #142

Tonight I'm going to read about pkgsrc and tomorrow give a try. It has active community last time I used it few years ago. Seems to have also binaries available at http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/

My quick notes on how to get started with pkgsrc More info: http://pkgsrc.org/ http://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/pkgsrc_64bit_osx/ # Download pkgsrc curl -O https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/stable/pkgsrc.tar.bz2 # validate shasum $ curl -O https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/stable/pkgsrc.tar.bz2.SHA1 $ cat pkgsrc.tar.bz2.SHA1 $ shasum pkgsrc.tar.bz2 # extract pkgsrc archive. Mine lives at ~/Work and I also install built…

You can find homebrew uninstall info from here

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/share/doc/homeb...

  # I did:
  
  # remove all packages
  $ for f in $(brew list); do brew remove "$f"; done
  
  # download uninstall script
  $ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall
  # review script
  # run uninstall script
  $ chmod +x uninstall
  $ ./uninstall
  ...
  
  # review
  /usr/local/bin/
  /usr/local/etc/
  /usr/local/lib/
  /usr/local/share/
  
  # I removed
  $ rm -rf /usr/local/share/ /usr/local/etc/
  
  # Restore permissions
  
  $ sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local
  $ sudo chgrp wheel /usr/local
Post reply on HN