171–180 of 342 posts
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." I feel I need something like uMatrix, but for the entire OS. Is it time to familiarize myself with netstat and firewall rules?
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…
These kinds of complains are fine, I don't think we should stop them.
It's a bit like corruption in politics, it's not going to be solved anytime soon, but complains do raise awareness and prevent abuses. Who know what's going to happen if we stop complaining?
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…
> 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. Homebrew lead maintainer here. We're chronically understaffed and underfunded. We have analytics so we can make Homebrew better by figuring out how to prioritise security, maintenance and bug fixes on packages based on how much th…
Exactly this. The homebrew team has done an amazing job for the past 7 years, all free and volunteer work. People threatening with suing the maintainer are poison for the open-source community. But hey, haters gonna hate.
If I understand correctly, the data is anonymized before it is sent to Google [1]. How may people worrying about privacy download from Github using a proxy/vpn solution to hide their IP?
I've listened to the Changelog podcast about Homebrew and first learned about Google Analytics there. I think people do not realize how big homebrew is (in form of usage and traffic). At this scale, the maintainer opted for collecting data anonymously in order to find bottlenecks and improving the entire software stack. You can disable that feature in the same way you would disable cookies in your web browser.
[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....
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…
> 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. Homebrew lead maintainer here. We're chronically understaffed and underfunded. We have analytics so we can make Homebrew better by figuring out how to prioritise security, maintenance and bug fixes on packages based on how much th…
As a long-term homebrew user, I am very appreciative of your hard work (and have even contributed here and there), but in that light I am also very disappointed that I have to manually disable analytics and now have a lot less trust in the homebrew project.
In the same way that I would complain if I were to see a bug in your code that radically effects my production, I consider this invasion of privacy - whatever the justification - worthy of complaint, too. Whatever the justification for this, its not an acceptable path to take, and I strongly urge you to consider making Analytics opt-in, and not opt-out. I have no problem with my next 'brew update' pausing, explaining the situation rationally as you have in this post, and giving me a y/n opportunity to proceed with participating in analytics. I do have a serious problem with you assuming that this is okay, not informing me of it in a fashion that makes me aware of the tracking, and just letting it slip in during an update, which I am now even more suspicious of, even though I do them religiously every week, and have done so for years.
You've just made your product less attractive to me as a developer and user. That's a sad state of affairs, and I hope you fix this bug.
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…
Please make it opt in. If you truly believe people closely read the prompts for having their data harvested, a default to "No" should not impact you at all. If you don't believe they read the prompts closely, you're an asshole for stealing data by default.
My problem is that I believe that 90% of the users of my app won't care one way or the other if I record these stats. If I default opt-out these people, then I lose all that useful data and in the process, I believe, make my app worse for everyone.
I won't deny this is not an obvious choice, but I think personally on balance it's better to opt-in. Especially when the data is anonymised and doesn't contain any private/identifying information. But I understand how others would disagree. If there was some kind of OS-wide "don't record what I do" option I could hook into, I would use it.
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…
No real security reason? We can test that. The developer who added this feature can easy earn trust in such statement by changing the disclaimer and making themselves liable if information extracted through this mechanism causes any identifiable harm.
If this is a sure bet, no risk, perfectly guarantied to be safe, then such change should be trivial.
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…
People here are talking about opt out vs opt in but there's a third option: Forced choice. This is where you present the two options to the user (without either prechecked / default) and the user has to choose one or the other to continue. This avoids both the problem that the user doesn't consent with opt-out, and the problem that nobody cares to opt-in. The disadvantage is it doesn't work with unattended upgrades.
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…
If developers needs an information about how user uses a program, they should ask them to help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you use brew? Have you contributed code to it? Have you installed something using brew, before updating brew for a while? For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case. I call that progress, no matter how sm…
I can totally see the benefits of telemetry. But it would be way less phishy if it were opt-in, or at least opt-out with a very visible information message.
By the way I think that browser history should be disabled by default too.