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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Given the number of people who work for Google, and Google's internal culture of openness, I find it extremely unlikely that Google is violating its customers' privacy. That would almost certainly get whistleblown.
Does not exist like you think when it comes to projects. People are very secretive about lots of projects for all kinds of internal political reasons. Using data they technically have the right to use in a somewhat scummy way is a perfect example of a project that would be kept out of the spotlight.
If you listen to Changelog #223 podcast[0], both Mike and the podcast author showed quite a lot of derision and condescension to the people caring about analytics upload, so I don't think it's getting fixed. [0]: https://changelog.com/podcast/223
Maybe the reason they needed analytics in the first place is because of this myopic perspective. If you assume everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, you're going to stall really quickly.
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…
Homebrew lead maintainer here. This is exactly why we do it. To repeat myself from below: we're chronically understaffed and underfunded.
> Furthermore, now that you know, for brew specifically, will you opt out?
It's worth noting: if everyone who uses a niche piece of software opt-out when it breaks we'll look at our analytics and likely remove it from Homebrew instead of fixing it. This may be unfair but given the amount of work: we need ways to prioritise. Analytics have helped us do that so we can prioritise fixes on things that are critical for many people.
> As far as we can tell it would be impossible for Google to match the randomly generated Homebrew-only analytics user ID to any other Google Analytics user ID. If Google turned evil the only thing they could do would be to lie about anonymising IP addresses and attempt to match users based on IP addresses.
Look, by now Google knows my whole stack and what I'm doing with each project, and Homebrew using Google Analytics doesn't bother me much. I still disabled it a while ago and after reading "if Google turned evil" put like a remote possibility I won't turn it back on. There are two extremes in tech — paranoia about everything and magical optimism about everything. This is an example of the latter.
A corporation of Google's scale and relevance to different industries simply cannot afford to not be evil.
Doesn't mean they're absolutely evil and just waiting for an opportunity to partner with a hypothetical fascist government — just that you can't assume the best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This. A thousand times this. To me this whole thing feels like the maintainer is trying to justify something that most people won't ever accept as the status quo. Bad times when software this solid is going in a wrong direction. Time for a Homebrew fork?
Unless of course you are fundamentally opposed to tracking of any kind, then a fork is required. It is a fairly massive infrastructure to recreate however...
Serves me right for running it via cron I guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yeah, carrier contracts also "disclose" everything, there's a reason why it's called "small print".
It would only take to make it opt-in, instead of opt-out to rectify this.
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…
Opt Out is scammy. Command line tools do not usually do this at all, particularly FOSS command line tools. This is a very worrying development and reduces my trust in FOSS. --edit-- to whoever downvoted me, can you explain why? I love FOSS but I also lovemy privacy. I have come to generally have a default level of trust for popular FOSS projects. Things like this make me question that trust. Why is this wrong?
Agreed.
> reduces my trust in FOSS
Please don't distrust a whole category because of a single tool. Most FOSS tools don't do this, especially if they're "Free Software" as opposed to just being "open-source", since "Free Software" indicates a moral, not just practical stance on software.