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

301–310 of 329 posts

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#301

Post by davesque »

shizcakes wrote: post #203
eistrati wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second that. It must be an opt-in feature.

I don't see why; you're tracked like this on nearly every website you visit unless you opt out. This isn't malicious.

Yes, but those are websites. Some degree of tracking is vital to the functioning of many websites. e.g. No cookies, no sessions (generally speaking). Furthermore, it is expected that a lot of websites are tracking you.

I feel pretty safe in saying that most developers do not expect a command-line tool to phone home without saying, especially if this behavior was introduced in an update for a tool which didn't do that historically (and without any notification of the change).

Considering the popularity of this tool, it's a bit shocking that the core dev team of Homebrew didn't seem to anticipate that people would be upset by this. It really knocks my trust in and willingness to depend on this project.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#302

Post by tremon »

cstrahan wrote: post #299
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the purpose of /usr/local. /nix/store? Really? You can't just make up new root level directories. That's so wrong.

> That's the purpose of /usr/local. I think you must have ignored a substantial portion of my comment. Let's take a look at what (part of) my Nix store looks like (you'll see it fundamentally looks nothing like /usr/local): /nix/store/2mmvks92lx37xghj0795ldzrg50lh2pg-bash-4.3-p42 ├── bin │ ├── bash │ ├── bashbug │ └── sh -> bash └── share ├── info │ ├── bash.info … … └── man └── man1 ├── bash.1.gz └── bashbug.1.gz /n…

Funny that you should mention the FHS. From that same document:

Applications must never create or require special files or subdirectories in the root directory. Other locations in the FHS hierarchy provide more than enough flexibility for any package.

They really should be using /opt:

/opt is reserved for the installation of add-on application software packages.

A package to be installed in /opt must locate its static files in a separate /opt/ or /opt/ directory tree

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#303

Post by tremon »

mescalito wrote: post #285

I normally enjoyed the insight and comments of the thread more than the content of the article and don't comment that much. But my personal opinion on this, only to share it and be heard possibly by the developers of homebrew, is that I honestly do not care about this. It's nice they are open about it, it's a hell of a tool and hey, if they want to track what I do to improve it, have my data. I really don't see the o…

Because it's open source it should be opt-in?

Because the sending of data to a third party is not directly related to the functioning of the software.

Analytics are a valuable source of information for the developer

Yet it's not the developer's data, it's the users' data.

you probably use several closed source tools that track you, sometimes without even telling you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

I wonder if all of the opt-in advocates don't use gmail for their email. I am pretty sure they do

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#304

Post by dang »

TheLogothete wrote: post #253

Yeah. So every site and every product on the internet has this dark pattern. Do you use google? Youtube? StackOverflow? Are you outraged by them too?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11567580 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#305

Post by dang »

stephenr wrote: post #294
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think "calm your tits" is an acceptable thing to say in this sort of situation in this sort of 2016.

The person I replied to was getting quite agitated and abusing his/her caps lock/shift key. I asked him/her to calm down, in an informal manner. Why is it unacceptable to you?

Your comments are breaking the HN guidelines. If you continue to do that, we will ban your account. Please (re-)read the rules and post civilly and substantively or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#306

Post by ThisIs_MyName »

pdkl95 wrote: post #260
developer2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The IP is still logged with Google, according to their own documentation Not quite[1]. The full IP never makes it to disk. It's true that "anonymous IP" isn't as anonymous as I'd have expected. Only the last octet of an IPv4 address is removed. Considering homebrew's use specifically , not just looking at GA in general, I think this is acceptable. [1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en

> The full IP never makes it to disk. The full IP makes it to Google . We don't know what Google actually does with the packets they receive; we only know what they say. > Only the last octet of an IPv4 address is removed. Really? Wow. They aren't even pretending to anonymize addresses with a hash. Given that there is certainly more than 8-bits of identifying data in the other data sent to GA, a unique identifier can…

>They are preserving the network part of the address, which probably gives them the AS number.

Yep, it is guaranteed to reveal your ASN because the smallest IP prefix on the internet is /24.

The last 8 bits are not dependent on the network address.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#307

Post by ThisIs_MyName »

pdkl95 wrote: post #222
dudus wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also related: """ Google Analytics protects the confidentiality of Google Analytics data in several ways: Google Analytics data may not be shared without customer consent, except under certain limited circumstances, such as when required by law. Security-dedicated engineering teams at Google guard against external threats to data. Internal access to data (e.g., by employees) is regulated and subject to the Employee A…

> protects the confidentiality For their definition of "confidential", which they can change at any time. > certain limited circumstances If they only intended the "required by law" example, they wouldn't use such a broad - and completely undefined - set of circumstances. > guard against external threats Google may have good security practices now , but an continually growing collection of highly-revealing tracking d…

>they should indemnify the subjects of their spying against any damages those caused by those "external threats"

I despise GA as much as the next guy, but you'd have to be pretty crazy to expect any business to provide such a guarantee. Google isn't your insurance company.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#308

Post by ThisIs_MyName »

TheLogothete wrote: post #251
mortenlarsen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people disagree. If they didn't, why is this on HN with a lot of comments from people who a unhappy with this change? If software compromises my privacy, I feel that I have been betrayed and lost something that I can not take back. If you don't get to automatically participate in a "anonymous" usage survey, have you lost something you can not undo? That in my opinion, is why software should always err on the sid…

People just LOOVE to be outraged. For example in this thread people rage about google getting hands on their data. When I point out that the webmaster has to explicitly chose to share the data with google, I get downvoted. When I say that GA prohibits the use of PII, I get downvoted. It doesn't matter that I'm right. People WANT to be outraged. Reason, no reason, doesn't matter.

Chill, dude. Most of us dislike GA and its monopoly on web/mobile tracking. Why trust GA to respect webmaster options when you don't have to?

...anyway, complaining about getting downvoted is a surefire way to keep getting downvoted :P

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#309

Post by username223 »

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…

> I apologise for the poor communication.

Try apologizing for your poor behavior. You didn't "communicate poorly;" you offended people who used your software, and betrayed their trust. You can either make this thing opt-in, or "ease the opt-out process" and continue being a jerk.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#310

Post by nerdponx »

cat-dev-null wrote: post #262
sqldba wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that logic, CPython should track usage stats too.
Post reply on HN