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Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

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Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#131

Post by necovek »

matz1 wrote: post #115
Accacin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In what world does a disagreement over the right level of telemetry justify this kind of behavior? In a world where companies think little of collecting and selling our personal data to make a profit? In a world where companies feel the need to track every part of my life with or without my permission. This is something I can't escape, as every time I interact with someone that does use one of these platforms than…

Then what about the people who are fine with the tracking and selling personal data (I for one) ? I think its great that let say google manage to make money out of my personal data, and in return I get to use their of free service.

Great for you. But please smoke outside so the rest of us don't have to deal with negatives (eg. smell if not health issues).

(Hopefully you get the parallel: some of us consider it harmful, and the fact that you don't care or you actually enjoy it does not mean we should be subjected to it)

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#132

Post by maximente »

bigiain wrote: post #125
mbesto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lesson learned here - the CFO is not and should not be responsible for a company's tracking policies and communication thereof.

Sadly, that "F" means they pretty much have veto power over anything anybody (with the possible exception of the CTO and the board) wants to do.

sadly?

that the board failed to stop this (or was bypassed) is telling, but this doesn't seem like a failure of the corporate governance model or anything. money is basically essential to a corporation; engineering staff shouldn't be on the level of C suite, despite what many here would have you believe

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#133

Post by [deleted] »

necovek wrote: post #131
matz1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what about the people who are fine with the tracking and selling personal data (I for one) ? I think its great that let say google manage to make money out of my personal data, and in return I get to use their of free service.

Great for you. But please smoke outside so the rest of us don't have to deal with negatives (eg. smell if not health issues). (Hopefully you get the parallel: some of us consider it harmful, and the fact that you don't care or you actually enjoy it does not mean we should be subjected to it)

[deleted]

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#134

Post by journalctl »

brlewis wrote: post #47
stiray wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should really be praised... Without further, congratulations to everyone protesting against this gitlab move. This is something that should be done years back when google started with its tracking, same with facebook. This was the behaviour that should be seen each and every time some company wants to take advantage of its users. But to my sadness it is rarely seen. So once again congratulations to each and ever…

Yeah, people back then should have written angry replies to Google's and Facebook's advance warnings about the tracking they were planning on doing. /s

Oh, so we only live in a surveillance-capitalist state because we didn’t send Facebook and Google enough emails? D’oh! Who knew it was that simple?

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#135

Post by tofof »

Omin wrote: post #91
tssva wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An employee comment in the relevant merge request indicates that they are already knowing non-compliant with the GDPR. While I applaud their openness I wonder if this will comeback to bite them.

Do you have a link (or screenshot) of that comment?

"This is because we suspect that we are not currently in compliance but cannot expressly call out the gaps until the DPIAs are complete. (Actually, by not having the DPIAs, we are, on our face, out of compliance with GDPR regulations.)"

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...

The author, @cciresi is Candice Ciresi, their Director of Global Risk and Compliance.

https://i.imgur.com/52DUErO.png

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#137

Post by SamReidHughes »

EpicEng wrote: post #129
SamReidHughes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about existing contracts or the law in some far-off land, and neither are you. You deserve nothing. You aren't entitled to Gitlab releasing software the way you'd like them to. Maybe your brain tells you otherwise. Instead, just don't use their software. For example, I wish Windows 10 didn't have telemetry. But it does, so I don't use Windows 10. The world doesn't owe you a free Git issue tracker.

Oh, so you're not talking about the two ways in which he is objectively wrong in arguing to implement this feature, only that a vendor has the right to add user hostile terms to their ToS. Ok, well you've convinced me! Honestly, who here is arguing that they can't implement some form of this? No one. Exactly no one. We don't like what it, and we're the consumer! It's not entitlement to pushback when a vendor changes…

Let me make it clear for you then:

> Their CFO showed that he has little regard for the privacy of their users.

Their users are companies, who can put on their big boy pants and decide what they think of Gitlab earnestly gathering usage information, not deep personal secrets, that it uses to help it improve its own product so that it can better serve the customer.

Throwing this all under the same category of "privacy" that one might use for private content -- the content of emails, the content of messages, copyrighted material, trade secrets, and the like -- as if this is a great moral issue, is just not a clear-minded way of operating.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#138

Post by matz1 »

stiray wrote: post #38
jbk wrote: post #27

We received an apology email at the same time, well written, explaining what they did wrong, apologizing, promising to do a post-mortem, promising to not send to 3rd party trackers, and saying they did a mistake and waiting for feedbacks on the issue tracker. And with very little BS in the mail. Such level of transparency, of apologizing and clarity, especially written at the first person "I am truly sorry." is very…

What should really be praised... Without further, congratulations to everyone protesting against this gitlab move. This is something that should be done years back when google started with its tracking, same with facebook. This was the behaviour that should be seen each and every time some company wants to take advantage of its users. But to my sadness it is rarely seen. So once again congratulations to each and ever…

If you want to ban tracking, I would totally oppose it. I think its great that google manage to make money out of my personal data, and in return I get to use their of free service. Fortunately, in the regards of google user, there are more people who are fine (or don't care) with tracking.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#139

Post by semiotagonal »

maximente wrote: post #132
bigiain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, that "F" means they pretty much have veto power over anything anybody (with the possible exception of the CTO and the board) wants to do.

sadly? that the board failed to stop this (or was bypassed) is telling, but this doesn't seem like a failure of the corporate governance model or anything. money is basically essential to a corporation; engineering staff shouldn't be on the level of C suite, despite what many here would have you believe

Although I think the person is getting too much grief for this, I have to say that if a CFO is allowed to make decisions in an area where he lacks understanding, simply because his title starts with a "C", that counts as a failure of the governance model.

Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

#140

Post by sleepytimetea »

PacifyFish wrote: post #122

Maybe I've missed the boat, but what's the big deal about collecting telemetry? You already trust Gitlab with everything you store in Gitlab, like source code, which is presumably much more sensitive than the number of times you loaded a page or clicked on a button or whatever. Is it because the data would be stored with a third party, and you don't trust that third party? If Gitlab trusts the third party, and they'r…

"in Gitlab" has 2 meanings - Gitlab cloud and Gitlab on-premises. For customers running off-the-grid or in countries with enhanced privacy (GPDR?) laws and restrictions on where their data lives, this is not what they signed up for. Nor was the timeline forced on them reasonable in any way. Imagine your Oracle software TOS says we will now export anonymized data from your SQL queries to somewhere out there in the cloud ? What if it was a HIPAA-compliant hospital datacenter ?

We wouldn't want first-party telemetry either, we don't want _any_ data leaving our datacenter, period.

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