Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

tobiastom.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 342 posts

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#181

Post by arm »

agounaris wrote: post #152

OMG grow up, you use google every day, you have facebook, twitter and maps on your phone but suddenly you worry because the developer of brew who needs some metrics! The only thing missing now is the Snowden guy to make a blog post about it.

I think you should grow up and realize that not everyone conforms to your worldview. As an example, I don’t use Google every day (I use DuckDuckGo), I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, or Google Maps, nor do I have a phone (can’t justify the expense when I have Wi-Fi access most of the times I need it).

As echoed by many others above, I never gave Homebrew consent to send any information to Google; it should be opt-in. Frankly, I was quite annoyed after updating Homebrew and found it already trying to connect to Google Analytics immediately after. Thankfully, I was able to block the request with Little Snitch and then opt-out of the analytics, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth that they’d start collecting data before even letting me opt-out first!

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#182

Post by lentil »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #118
froh42 wrote: post #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 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…

> I'm now trying to plan vacation time to drive for a 14 hour round trip and pick it up

From a happy and grateful Homebrew user, thank you for all the work you are doing. It's really easy for folks to underestimate how much effort is involved in running a project like this. Details like the above should be a reminder that it's clearly a very significant amount of hard, sometimes thankless, work; work which you are in no way obligated to do. There are large numbers of people who owe you a massive debt of gratitude for all the time and hassle that your effort has saved them. And it's quite sad that we (people) tend not to speak up when we are happy, and only make noise when we're upset about something.

Thanks for continuing to work on this project!!

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#183

Post by jbg_ »

opk wrote: post #57
tfeldmann wrote: post #2

To disable this, execute brew analytics off

Any idea what to block if I want to just completely block google analytics at the firewall level?

Little Snitch is excellent for this. I remember running brew at some point and being asked by Little Snitch if it could connect to Google. I said "deny forever" and have never worried about it since.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#184

Post by hdra »

Chris2048 wrote: post #159
hdra wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 You're perfectly within your right to feel conned by the data collections. I myself opted-out after I saw the message when I installed home-brew few months ago and, yes, I am a bit bummed that I have to take these extra efforts to o…

There are too many projects as there are, let them "burn out" and make way for those that aren't spyware. Giving away something for free gives no guarantee of quality, but doesn't justify stealing analytics.

How about try not to assume malice out of people's free software from the very first thing they did that you don't agree with?

Its open source. Why not open an issue, contribute a patch to make the process opt-in, start a discussion, start a fork? Oh, of course, why would we do that when we can attack the maintainers, call their software a spyware, and threaten to sue instead? While we're at it, let's use words like "spyware" and "stealing" to paint them in an even worse light.

I, for one, loves the homebrew project, and I don't want the maintainers to burn out. There isn't much that I can contribute to the project, but calling out this kind of behaviour is the least I could do, and thats exactly what I'll do.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#185

Post by obj-g »

mikemcquaid wrote: post #118
froh42 wrote: post #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 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…

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work, it's appreciated by many. Maybe this wasn't the best choice, but missteps happen. Sadly, we'll never know how it might have been dealt with if people were able to take a deep breath and open a real, constructive dialogue about it rather than immediately freak out and make threats against you, forgetting (or simply not caring) that, by and large, people like you have been doing them huge favors while demanding nothing in return. Pathetic.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#186

Post by pvinis »

blub wrote: post #167
pvinis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely don't mean that we should shut up and take it. But before we complain about an open source project that maaaaany devs use happily, let's complain about those other cases first, yea?

We can complain just fine about whichever software we want, don't try to make up rules and come to us with fake outrage about even greater injustices. This is a classical attempt to muddy the waters.

Ok, sure. At least complain for both. I didn't see the post referring to anything besides brew. I'm all for protesting and trying to fix any size and kind of injustice. But just don't target the less guilty. brew is still guilty for not having an even bigger announcement. But less target others too, at least. I would hate to see brew or any other similar software be the sole target and have to change for the worse, because it was unlucky enough to be the scapegoat.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#187

Post by karmacoda »

emartinelli wrote: post #170
_b8r0 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to use Google Analytics and hand information over to a third party instead of using something hosted? I get that there may be money involved, but presumably self-hosting also gives them more of the information to build out what they need.

In another comment in this thread by @mikemcquaid (Homebrew lead maintainer): > (...)and have been trying to find people who will provide us with non-Google hosting but: we're chronically understaffed and underfunded[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438

What are the estimated costs for (something like) this?

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#188

Post by asymmetric »

akerro wrote: post #33
pvinis wrote: 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.

Is there a point in running both ublock and umatrix? Also, what do you mean by "clean links"? Striped of "utm..." parts?

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#189

Post by rubber_duck »

blub wrote: post #102
rubber_duck wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also somewhat related to this - recently I've realized that this privacy paranoia is going to slow down medical advances coming out from big data so much. 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, wher…

It's not paranoia, it's simple understanding of history and human nature.

Freaking out about disclosed anonymized analytics about package usage in an OSS project is paranoia in my book

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#190

Post by [deleted] »

blub wrote: post #102
rubber_duck wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also somewhat related to this - recently I've realized that this privacy paranoia is going to slow down medical advances coming out from big data so much. 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, wher…

It's not paranoia, it's simple understanding of history and human nature.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN