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Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

tobiastom.name

31–40 of 342 posts

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#31

Data is being sent to Google on probably every page you browse over the internet. And to 50 other data websites as well.

Data isn't being sent when I use most of my developer tooling. When I visit a website, I expect it's going to be inundated with garbage analytics so I use things like ublock and noscript.

What I don't expect is a package manager siphoning off data to Google.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#33
post #19

Yes we know. brew tells you that. And you can disable it. Data is being sent to Google everytime you do almost anything in almost all websites, using the same technology. So what? Some of the times it's to make the product better, or better targeted. Some other times it's just for spying on the users. Let's stop complaining about stuff that someone does and tell you they do it. There are many more that do the same th…

> Data is being sent to Google everytime you do almost anything in almost all websites using the save technology

No, it's not. µblock, µmatrix + clean links.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#34
post #12

I've seen this crop up a few times recently and a vocal minority seems to panic every time. I ran into it the other day installing pm2 w/ npm which downloads an optional package that they use for analytics https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/blob/master/package.json#L184 Is the problem that they are using google's service? Is it the tracking that people don't like? Is it the messaging/copy to the users? I'm sure there's p…

You know...you can already get analytics if your mirrors just agree to share logs. It may not be as detailed or complete, for sure, but using another analytical tools does feel a little superfluous. > Is the problem that they are using google's service? This is part of it I think. The brew devs get stats, but so does Google which they can aggregate across everything. Standing up your own analytics server/cluster, esp…

Does google simply have access to you analytics data to do whatever they want? I was under the impression that they could only use it in ways that you the account holder defines.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#35
This is google analytics. It's a bit different than google directly taking the data and using it for google purposes (e.g. streetview cars gathering SSID information for location pinpointing). The data (afaik) is used only by the homebrew team instead of Google.

A more accurate summary would be "Brew is sending usage data to a google owned analytics service".

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#36
post #21

I knew, and I was prompted. I can understand why this might upset people, but for me I hope it will make brew a better product. I'm sure we all know as developers how annoying it can be to not know the problems users have, and what they are using your software for -- that's why most websites have analytics. I'm hoping to add something similar to software I work on, with an opt-out of course. I believe it will help me…

If this is so good, make it out in. Out out is dishonest.

[deleted]

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#38
As I didn't update brew for a long time I did not have the analytics version. So I upgraded to see what happens.

In fact it did NOT prompt me when enabling analytics, but it did display a notice (hidden in several hundred lines of output during brew upgrade):

-------------------

+ 5a9e19f...7f13b37 master -> origin/master (forced update)

* [new tag] 0.1 -> 0.1 HEAD is now at 7f13b37 Merge pull request #1562 from woodruffw/check-admin-group

==> Homebrew has enabled anonymous aggregate user behaviour analytics

Read the analytics documentation (and how to opt-out) here: https://git.io/brew-analytics

==> Tapping homebrew/core

Cloning into '/usr/local/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core'...

remote: Counting objects: 3765, done.

remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3654/3654), done.

-------------------

I do not consider this a prominent warning. Rather it is sneaking analytics silently in the back door.

Looking at the website one of homebrew's developers (or at least the website developers) is based over here in Europe. He might be a nice target if you want to raise a stink and litigate. If I'd were a contributor I'd not want to have my name associated to something like this, even if it just happened out of stupidity not out of malice.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#40
post #21

I knew, and I was prompted. I can understand why this might upset people, but for me I hope it will make brew a better product. I'm sure we all know as developers how annoying it can be to not know the problems users have, and what they are using your software for -- that's why most websites have analytics. I'm hoping to add something similar to software I work on, with an opt-out of course. I believe it will help me…

If this is so good, make it out in. Out out is dishonest.

Opt in may be "more honest", but you're going to see a a lot less useful data as a result of it, because the pool of people who will opt in is less than the pool of people who wouldn't care what the default is.
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