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This topic has been discussed on The Changelog recently: https://changelog.com/podcast/223 If I recall correctly, opt-out was chosen because they really want/need some analytics data and most of the users would not opt-in.
Which means users have chosen what they prefer and silently extracting despite that choice isn't exactly trustful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have to start somewhere. Opt in should always be the standard.
Organ donation?
For example your wearables get to collect so much biometric info, if that data can be connected to detecting conditions early it would provide a lot of value down the road. At some point we will have the option to collect data about what you ate, what you did, where you went and then how that affected your biometrics, and we can inexpensively collect huge scale DNA samples, etc. all that data if available publicly could really provide insights in to things that are really not practical in limited group studies.
For reasons such as this I think I'm fine if services collect anonymized (unless we solve identity theft and such security concerns) information about me, I'd just want them to make this data free.
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 wood…
There you have it. Stop claiming there is a "prompt". It's the same as the "3rd party cookies enabled by default" setting on Firefox. It's the wrong default if you really care about your user's privacy as Firefox claims to do. It's hard to even find the setting unless you know where it is. And it's Google who is paying so it stays the way it is and patches that change it are rejected.
Suddenly they were met with headlines like "Mozilla/Firefox hates small business owners" and they are simply not capable of handling a publicity attack (remember the whole CEO thing?) and they caved in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Privacy-respecting defaults should be there so that you don't have to spend your whole day reading prompts and ToS looking for that one sentence that fucks you over.
Genuine curiosity question: Are all analytics a violation of privacy? If brew simply sent a message that said "brew was used" with no PII, would that matter? At what point is it an issue?
No, only the ones without active informed consent. Privacy is the embodiment of personal choice, after all.
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".
The data still goes to google. While the expectation would be that the data is only used by homebrew, there's no actual way of knowing that google isn't gratefully helping itself. And given the entire way Google's business works, they probably are.
I was aware, because I run Little Snitch. If you care, you should be too.
You're right, we probably should be using Little Snitch — just know that it's not a golden ticket! There has been some research about bypassing Little Snitch, for example this one from 2016: https://speakerdeck.com/patrickwardle/defcon-2016-i-got-99-p...