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Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

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Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#191

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

nxpnsv wrote: post #118
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Sure. But I have a question: why ? Why should we opt out of the telemetry? To me, this idea seems to not just be admitting defeat, it's ensuring defeat right from the start. Telemetry should always be opt-in. Yes, that means vendors will get much less data. It's on them to deal with it. On a related note, I wonder how long it takes until one of the vendors of popular CLI tools or desktop apps get fined for GDPR viola…

OPT-IN is so much better for users. But if analytics is helpful, then probably opt in means you get no data, unless you keep bugging people asking people to opt in - which would be horrible too

How can users be incentivized to opt-in, particularly with a free-to-use application? I can see a case for ad-supported software, a developer could reduce or eliminate ads for that user in exchange for telemetry data...

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#192

Post by Seirdy »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #157
finnthehuman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll play the devil's advocate. Your point is basically "surveillance data is useful". And, well, yes. There would be zero debate over surveillance if there were literally no desirable reasons to have it.

Calling it surveillance is misleading in most cases. The most recent crash reporting system I worked with was little more than a stack trace without any user data recorded at all. Not even IP addresses of the report. We didn’t care who was crashing and we didn’t collect any PII at all. It was a simple report about where in our code the crash occurred. It was very useful for fixing bugs. No surveillance or PII involve…

How do users know if that's all the data that's submitted? Auditing every program to see exactly what gets sent (and repeating the process for every update) is way too much work; it's safer to just opt-out by default.

Now that I think about it, it's safer to simply not use software that opts users into studies (like telemetry analysis) without informed consent.

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#194

Post by s17n »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Sure. But I have a question: why ? Why should we opt out of the telemetry? To me, this idea seems to not just be admitting defeat, it's ensuring defeat right from the start. Telemetry should always be opt-in. Yes, that means vendors will get much less data. It's on them to deal with it. On a related note, I wonder how long it takes until one of the vendors of popular CLI tools or desktop apps get fined for GDPR viola…

Or maybe software "should" do whatever the creators of the software feel like making it do, and you should fork it if you don't like their decisions.

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#195

Post by yeahforsureman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Sure. But I have a question: why ? Why should we opt out of the telemetry? To me, this idea seems to not just be admitting defeat, it's ensuring defeat right from the start. Telemetry should always be opt-in. Yes, that means vendors will get much less data. It's on them to deal with it. On a related note, I wonder how long it takes until one of the vendors of popular CLI tools or desktop apps get fined for GDPR viola…

If you think GDPR always requires consent, you would be wrong. Consent is just one of many possible legal bases, and usually the one you use only when you can't use any of the rest. In this case, and more widely, it's not at all clear which types of personal data processing do or do not require consent.

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#196

Post by drran »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #157
finnthehuman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll play the devil's advocate. Your point is basically "surveillance data is useful". And, well, yes. There would be zero debate over surveillance if there were literally no desirable reasons to have it.

Calling it surveillance is misleading in most cases. The most recent crash reporting system I worked with was little more than a stack trace without any user data recorded at all. Not even IP addresses of the report. We didn’t care who was crashing and we didn’t collect any PII at all. It was a simple report about where in our code the crash occurred. It was very useful for fixing bugs. No surveillance or PII involve…

In Linux, we use `abrt` for that, but user need to review and submit bug report with stack trace manually, so nobody complains about that. Yep, it's very useful.

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#197

Post by Igelau »

BowBun wrote: post #141

Agreed with many other posters here - the execution was messy and definitely lacked the calm and collected attitude I'm used to seeing when looking at new standards being discussed. I was also unimpressed with the tone of the issues/PRs opened. As an adult, one of the many lessons we learn is that if you want people to do something you want, you should be friendly, constructive, and positive - not calling out people…

Someone probably went looking for telemetry opt-out stuff since the recent discussion of Audacity's telemetry and weird policy changes. Somehow they found this.

Unfortunately, the way this guy conducted himself was terrible. His tone and behavior in the issues and insistence that it's a standard just because he made a webpage were really off-putting. I can see why no one was champing at the bit to endorse this.

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#198

Post by fomine3 »

tjoff wrote: post #160
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it surveillance is misleading in most cases. The most recent crash reporting system I worked with was little more than a stack trace without any user data recorded at all. Not even IP addresses of the report. We didn’t care who was crashing and we didn’t collect any PII at all. It was a simple report about where in our code the crash occurred. It was very useful for fixing bugs. No surveillance or PII involve…

If that was the norm then people would opt in. But the trust is gone now, bad actors have ruined it for everyone. And the solution to that is not to enable it by default.

For ad industry, trust is gone now. But for telemetry? I think most people don't much care.

Re: Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

#200

Post by Seirdy »

fouric wrote: post #163

I do not support this idea. The differences between the things they all group together under one umbrella is wild - ads, usage reporting, automatic updates, and crash reporting are all very different things and it's actively harmful to control all of them with a single switch. At the very least, there should be two different switches - "ads" and "everything else". If you don't want telemetry or crash reporting, that'…

Lots of people in the Free Software community think that programs should exist only to help the user, and should just do exactly what the user tells them to do and nothing else. I am one of those people. Showing ads, making network requests that aren't necessary to carry out the expected functionality, etc. all fall under violations of that principle. Some violations are worse than others, but I treat them the same way.

It's on the developers of the software to make these settings granular and off-by-default. If I want to help a developer, I'll go out of my way to do it and flip one of those switches if that's what it takes.

Personally, I don't think this goes far enough; I think programs should require explicit consent simply to connect to the network, and most should request permission to connect only to certain domains. But that's just me ;).

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