How is this different from the telemetry that VS Code is collecting? The "community" seems to have swallowed that pill with much less complaining.
Is that the same community that is complaining now?
Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
261–270 of 285 posts
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#262The reaction to this whole saga has been insane. Chill out people. They fucked up, users gave feedback, they listened. This isn't some corporate conspiracy, some grand ethical dilemma with an evil company on one side and some white knight hackers on the other. Let's imagine for a second that they are people trying to do the right thing, with years of history doing the best they can. They wanted to measure usage to ma…
>"The reaction to this whole saga has been insane. Chill out people."
No, it hasn't unless a civil discussion in an area where people have strong opinions is somehow your definition of "insane."
>"People seem to disagree, which, okay, but the outrage here is everything wrong with the internet."
There is no "outrage" here just lots of concern if not some well-placed bewilderment at a particular brusque comment made by their CFO on the issue[1]
The great irony is that you have dismissed and self-proclaimed that an entire civilized and adult discussion as "outrage culture" and "everything wrong with the internet."
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying "the deterioration of quality in most modern software" is such a cop-out. There's no universal agreement upon any "general" deterioration, and I'm not sure you're keeping track of the "deteriorating" software that has telemetry vs. the one that doesn't. I personally find that a lot of software I use daily does improve over time, especially web software. You want a counter-example? Reddit has very little teleme…
> Saying "the deterioration of quality in most modern software" is such a cop-out. Fair. It's just my opinion. Though I'm not the only one expressing it. You've probably heard the phrase "optimizing for lowest common denominator", or as 'dredmorbius calls it, "the tyranny of the minimum viable user". > I personally find that a lot of software I use daily does improve over time, especially web software. I find the rev…
> GMail and Dropbox being prominent examples.
Dropbox I'd agree with, gmail I actually much prefer the current UI to the old one.
And indeed web services do tend to optimize for the "lowest common denominator", or more generally for the "majority of users". Which does tend to fuck over power-users. But it also means for most people telemetry works out.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the CFO is dead wrong. I'm a very vocal Gitlab advocate and would have stopped promoting them if they did this. There are 100's if not 1000's of people like me and we help build Gitlab value. And then there is the GDPR to contend with.
The only sense in which he's "wrong" is as you describe: people won't want to use the software, and it's a bad decision when it comes to making money. He's not wrong on some principles-based reason.
I guess you just like to argue.
It's strictly illegal under GDPR, the agreement is void as it contradicts the law (you cannot have terms and conditions superseding the law). The policy - "agree to tracking" must be explained and justified, consent must be given (affirmative action by customer/user).
Failing to do that and holding user's data as hostage would be compliance breach. GDPR fines are no joke and set forward to prevent abuse. (up to 20m euro or 4% global revenue) GitLab is no small business any more and a fine would outweight the 'tracking profits'
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure that American companies are immune to fines resulting from EU court sentences if they want to make business in EU?
If at all, then only as long as they're conducting their business with EU customers entirely from the US. As soon as they're putting servers in a colo in the EU, there's something that EU authorities could confiscate to cover outstanding fines.
this has been explained tons of times.
You cannot conduct business in the EU unless you have a VAT number issued by any of the member (still 28) states. You cannot sell anything in the EU w/o VAT, it'd be illegal. The company =must= pay the collected VAT to the respective member state(s).
So they have to register in the EU to conduct business (and issue VAT receipts). This requires some assets and people to be responsible.
The only way to conduct business outside is a small shipments (less than 22e) that would be free of VAT and customs clearance.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#266If I pay for a product (on-premise), it's not your business what I do with it.
If I use the free hosted service (ex: gitlab.com), then this is the price to pay for a free service (within legal rules like GDPR).
BTW, it's too late for me. I'm about to move all my stuff to a self-hosted Gitea (on a cheap VPS) in addition to Matrix, Mastodon, ...
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
You opt in to first party telemetry by using gitlab. It is impossible for you not to send data to gitlab when using gitlab. Self-host it if you don't want it. I dunno what to tell you; at some point, the company does have to observe how people use their product, and they'll do so a lot more effectively by looking at how most people are using it, rather than … idk, send a survey or something. Not that they won't do th…
> You opt in to first party telemetry by using gitlab. It is impossible for you not to send data to gitlab when using gitlab. There is still a difference between sending actions you selected to the server and tracking where you move the mouse while on the page in your browser or other bs like that. One is required to implement the functionality, the other is not.
Telemetry doesn't necessarily mean tracking mouse movements.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really not too much to ask smokers to not externalize the health problems of their addiction to other people. On the contrary, a decent human being would not willingly expose non-smokers to cigarette smoke. Unfortunately, there's not enough decency around to outweight convenience, so it had to be turned into law. As for telemetry, I can't find any reason one would willingly subject to it. But even if, that's why…
>It's really not too much to ask smokers to not externalize Sure, from the perspective of non-smokers. >On the contrary, a decent human being would not willingly expose non-smokers to cigarette smoke A decent non smoker can also excuse themselves, in order not to disturb the smokers. >Unfortunately, there's not enough decency around to outweight convenience, so it had to be turned into law This is nothing to do with…
> Sure, from the perspective of non-smokers.
From the perspective of any moral human being. Not intentionally harming others is kind of fundamental.
> A decent non smoker can also excuse themselves, in order not to disturb the smokers.
Non-smokers came first. And there's more of them. Plus, non-smokers are at best inconvenience to smokers, while smokers are a health hazard to non-smokers.
> Lets say in a place where 95% are smokers, or even in the place there are 5% smokers but those 5% has a lot of power/influence. Do you think there will be law againts smokers ?
Not likely. If the smokers are decent people, there won't be a problem; if they aren't, they obviously won't vote in laws that inconvenience them. But that only tells about deficiencies of the regulatory process, which optimizes for the loudest voices instead of maximizing good for everyone.
> Like I said before, I am fine with tracking because the benefit outweight the cost, it gives me something in return, free or cheap service.
And like I said, that's why current legal standard people are leaning towards is not to ban it, but to make it opt-in. So if you're fine with tracking, you can have it. The problem is with the infectious, anticompetitive nature of tracking - once one party does it to offset their costs, all other competitors have to follow suit or risk getting outcompeted.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Saying "the deterioration of quality in most modern software" is such a cop-out. Fair. It's just my opinion. Though I'm not the only one expressing it. You've probably heard the phrase "optimizing for lowest common denominator", or as 'dredmorbius calls it, "the tyranny of the minimum viable user". > I personally find that a lot of software I use daily does improve over time, especially web software. I find the rev…
> GMail and Dropbox being prominent examples. Dropbox I'd agree with, gmail I actually much prefer the current UI to the old one. And indeed web services do tend to optimize for the "lowest common denominator", or more generally for the "majority of users". Which does tend to fuck over power-users. But it also means for most people telemetry works out.
I disagree that this works out well, because - perhaps unlike the data-driven companies - I don't believe the measure of a good program is the number of registered users. I believe it's just a half of the equation, and the actual equation looks more like (number of users * average utility for user)[0]. Whenever you dumb down your application by removing useful features or sacrificing ergonomics for looks, you're trading average utility for adoption. The software is more appealing to more people, but less useful to them[1].
It does fuck over power-users, but it also fucks over regular users. Not only doing tasks takes longer than it could (or than it took in previous generations of equivalent software), it often precludes them from becoming power users. Because a "power user" of a specific suite of software is something a person becomes over time and repeated exposure. Which includes essentially everyone doing a full-time job in front of computers. I believe dumbed down software is causing a huge hidden economic loss in reduced efficiency of office workers. Not to mention their misery.
(A good example here would be POS systems. If you've ever seen a DOS based one, you'll know it's an order of magnitude more efficient to use than the current breed of browser-based ones. The old-school UI was clean, ergonomic, consistent and fully keyboard-operated, allowing to do most tasks without even looking at the screen for most of the time. There was a relevant thread on HN recently[2].)
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[0] - actually, I think it's more like: $$ \sum_{user \in users} utility_{user} $$ (https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?%5Csum_%7Buser%20%5Cin%...).
[1] - by "useful" I mean, what tasks it lets users accomplish and how efficiently.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's really not too much to ask smokers to not externalize Sure, from the perspective of non-smokers. >On the contrary, a decent human being would not willingly expose non-smokers to cigarette smoke A decent non smoker can also excuse themselves, in order not to disturb the smokers. >Unfortunately, there's not enough decency around to outweight convenience, so it had to be turned into law This is nothing to do with…
> Sure, from the perspective of non-smokers. From the perspective of any moral human being. Not intentionally harming others is kind of fundamental. > A decent non smoker can also excuse themselves, in order not to disturb the smokers. Non-smokers came first. And there's more of them. Plus, non-smokers are at best inconvenience to smokers, while smokers are a health hazard to non-smokers. > Lets say in a place where…
>From the perspective of any moral human being. Not intentionally harming others is kind of fundamental.
Sure, at least from your perspective. But all human being ? Even now we disagree.
There are some people that to them harming people is the moral thing to do.
You may then say they are wrong, but again you view it from your morality, using your definition of 'wrong'.
>Non-smokers came first.
Sure, for the Non-smokers, Non-smokers came first.
>And there's more of them
Right, so its more to do with which side has more power/influence.
>Plus, non-smokers are at best inconvenience to smokers
Sure the non-smokers can dismiss it as merely inconvenience. But I'm sure there is some smokers that are highly suffer from not able to smoke anywhere anytime.
>Not likely. If the smokers are decent people, there won't be a problem
Again, some smokers can use the same argument, if the non-smokers are decent people, they can excuse themselves and there won't be a problem.
>if they aren't, they obviously won't vote in laws that inconvenience them
While I'm sure within smokers there are people who support the law, but I'm taking about the smokers who againts the law. Unfortunately, they fail or just don't have enough power/influence to prevent the law to exist.
>deficiencies of the regulatory process, which optimizes for the loudest voices instead of maximizing good for everyone
Its not deficiencies because it just the way it is, whichever side who are the strongest get to decide the law.
Maximizing good for everyone is an impossibility. What one human consider as good may be considered bad to other human.
>And like I said, that's why current legal standard people are leaning towards is not to ban it, but to make it opt-in. So if you're fine with tracking, you can have it
Sure if you can gain the power/influence to make it law. But I hope not and I will not support it. why ? It increase friction/inconvenience. Just like the cookie warning, its highly annoying, I would much prefer it to be opt-out or no option at all.