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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

#311

Post by pdkl95 »

ThisIs_MyName wrote: post #307
pdkl95 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't really expect that anyone would make that kind of guarantee; I'm arguing in the style of a proof by contradiction. These businesses shouldn't be making this kind of claim, and they shouldn't be holding onto data beyond what is necessary. Data should be expunged as soon as possible, because then there isn't anything to protect.

Businesses are acting like there is no risk in holding personal information. When people complain, they respond with claims that the data is safe. When businesses act like they are secured and that we should trust them, we should be asking them to stand behind those claims. I agree, this is crazy, but businesses really want to make strong claims but not be bound by those claims. An honest business that actually believed in their own promises shouldn't have problem putting those promises into a formal guarantee.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#312

Post by stevenhubertron »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #121
hk__2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a Homebrew user, thanks for your efforts. I'm totally fine with the change myself, and I apologize for everyone else in here who cares about their privacy, but doesn't really care about the time volunteers are committing, nor the time savings from this feature.

I concur, thank you for wanting to do a better job with readily available tools that are widely used and easy to implement. I support your use of GA.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#313

Post by ctvo »

username223 wrote: post #309
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.

Feeling this betrayed and entitled over anonymous analytics in an open source project?

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#314

Post by bm5k »

ctvo wrote: post #313
username223 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Feeling this betrayed and entitled over anonymous analytics in an open source project?

When it's not opt-in, yes. As developers, we should know better.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#315

Post by fabulist »

hk__2 wrote: post #300
fabulist wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a feature where users can opt-in for periodic reports to be uploaded as a private gist, and a link is transmitted to you. GitHub is already a trusted party where Homebrew is concerned, so the loss of privacy is minimal. Users control their own GitHub accounts, so they control of the permanence of the data you collect on them. You can use Google Forms to transmit the links, so your infrastructure is cheap-to-free.…

We don’t want personal data; we only care about aggregation. Being able to link each gist to its owner would be a privacy issue here.

Excellent point, I should've thought of that.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#316

Post by fit2rule »

abjorn wrote: post #290
fit2rule wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every user on this machine? On every Mac in the house? Meh. What I want: "brew disable analytics" There, now I don't have to think about it any more, nor maintain a .profile/.bashrc, nor do it every single time for every user.

You would still need to do it for every user, anytime you create a new one. I fail to see how that's any different from, say `echo "export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1" >> .bashrc` Of course, the better alternative IS for it to be opt-in, which it should be.

This:

>>>`echo "export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1" >> .bashrc`

.. makes me responsible for it. This:

>>> brew analytics no-never

.. makes brew responsible for it. There is a big difference. Some of us don't want to have to maintain yet another .bashrc file tweak just to have a safe and sane environment.

I hope the homebrew guys will pay attention to this issue.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#317

Post by fit2rule »

shrikant wrote: post #276
fit2rule wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very single-user-centric view. Some of us have Macs with many hundreds of users. And so .. It is too invasive of my .bashrc/.profile that I have to use it to disable spy activity. I'd rather brew just have its own flag somewhere that says "Don't ever send analytics, ever, for any user on this system.."

Maybe put it in /etc/bashrc ?

Maybe not have to pollute files just to not be spied on, hmm.. I'm sure brew has the cleverness to keep this configuration option in its own tree.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#318

Post by masklinn »

nerdponx wrote: post #310
cat-dev-null wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does to a very limited extent, in that pypi collects downloads statistics.

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#319

Post by username223 »

ctvo wrote: post #313
username223 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Feeling this betrayed and entitled over anonymous analytics in an open source project?

I personally don't care about the tracking, since I don't use homebrew, but corporate f-you non-apologies annoy me. No one is complaining about "poor communication;" they're complaining about a feature they dislike. An actual apology would be something like "I apologize for adding this feature, and I am removing it."

Re: Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics

#320

Post by mescalito »

tremon wrote: post #303
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…

Nice links, that's why I like comments.

Ok, let's don't state it as an argument, but rather as a question.

Do anyone that's so much against opt-in is aware of closed source tools that tracks you and use it anyway?

And..

Do you use any third party web service like gmail or any other?

Although I hardly think I'll get an answer from most. At some point you have to make assumptions, wether those are fallacies, ok.

It's true it's not directly related to the functioning of the software, but it improves it in anyway, then there's a connection with it.

I take developer side and I personally look for see the grater good/less harm and compromise.

Opt-in will likely give them very little % of adherence and thus rendering all of this useless. Most of the opt-in advocates have technical capabilities to opt-out in any way (homebrew way, network filters, forking ,etc...). So why not simply letting this go?

I do think homebrew is a rather technical tool so most users are tech savvy guys, but still.

For me, this is pretty similar debate to donating organs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Opt-in_versus_o...

And I am 100% an opt-out advocate!

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