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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

#221

Post by cmsj »

notatoad wrote: post #212
Seirdy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>it's on the developers of the software to make these settings granular and off-by-default. why? privacy advocates in these discusssions always jump to this position and assume everybody is going to agree just because they've invoked the magic p-word. telemetry is useful, and most people don't really care enough to change the defaults one way or the other. assuming that "because privacy" is not an argument that will…

> telemetry is useful

I'm just going to point out that you accused privacy advocates of magical assertions, then did the same thing :)

(there is a point of view which says that you make good products through thoughtful and rigorous design, rather than pouring over databases of events to try and reverse engineer how people are actually using your product)

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

#222

Post by TeMPOraL »

Nextgrid wrote: post #213
fomine3 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Until you realize that most telemetry infrastructure is provided by ad companies (Google Analytics for example).

That, and additionally, if there's an opportunity to monetize data from (or derived from) telemetry further, companies won't hesitate selling it (or access to it) to third parties.

That, and additionally, if the data is stored, it's a question of when, not if, it'll become a part of some data breach.

To developers and entrepreneurs feeling surprised by the pushback here, please take a honest look at the state of the software industry. Any trust software companies enjoyed by default is gone now.

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

#223

Post by notatoad »

cmsj wrote: post #221
notatoad wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's on the developers of the software to make these settings granular and off-by-default. why? privacy advocates in these discusssions always jump to this position and assume everybody is going to agree just because they've invoked the magic p-word. telemetry is useful, and most people don't really care enough to change the defaults one way or the other. assuming that "because privacy" is not an argument that will…

> telemetry is useful I'm just going to point out that you accused privacy advocates of magical assertions, then did the same thing :) (there is a point of view which says that you make good products through thoughtful and rigorous design, rather than pouring over databases of events to try and reverse engineer how people are actually using your product)

as a developer, i find crash reports helpful when troubleshooting issues, and use device metrics like screen size to determine where to focus limited developer efforts. telemetry is useful because i use it. that's not a magical assertion.

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

#224

Post by TeMPOraL »

Seirdy wrote: post #192
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…

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.

> How do users know if that's all the data that's submitted?

That's the thing, isn't it? They'll never know. They can't; it takes deep technical knowledge to even be able of conceptualize what data could be sent, and how it could be potentially misused.

Which is to say, it's all a matter of trust. Shipping software with opt-out telemetry (or one you can't disable) isn't a good way to earn that trust.

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

#225

Post by pavon »

s17n wrote: post #194
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.

Maybe contractors should take whatever they want from your house while they are doing their job. If you don't like it you should monitor them more closely, and opt-out, or do business with others.

The software you write is yours. My data is not. You have every right to include or not include features, but you have no right to take my data without my permission. Your rights end where mine begin.

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

#228

Post by ryandrake »

adkadskhj wrote: post #170
tjoff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this might be the winning argument. There may not be any meaningful reason for telemetry to outweigh the bad actors and damage they've done. For me, i'd love to enable telemetry for some of my more liked, FOSS apps - but even with those my question immediately arises "What are you sending?". Without someway to monitor, are they sending filenames? Are they sending file contents? How much is it? etcetc To satis…

Excellent point. As a user, here are my requirements if you want me to opt into your data collection scheme:

1. All exfiltration of data must be under my direct control, each time it happens. You can collect all the data you want in the background, but any time it is transmitted to the company, I must give consent and issue a command to do it (or click a button).

2. All data that is exfiltrated must be described in detail before it is exfiltrated. "Diagnostic data" isn't good enough. List everything. Stack trace? Crash report? Memory dump? Personal info (list them all out)? Location information? Images (what are they, screenshots? from my camera?) Time stamps from each collection. If it's nebulous "feature usage data" then list each activity that is being logged (localized in my language). Lay them all out for me or I'm not going to press that Submit button.

3. I need to be able to verify that #2 is accurate, so save that dump to disk somewhere I can analyze later.

4. The identifiers used to submit this data should be disclosed. Is a unique user id required to upload? Do you link subsequent uploads to the same unique id? Is that id in any way associated with me as an account or as a person in your backend? I want you to disclose all of this.

5. For how long do you retain the data I sent? How is this enforced? Is there a way for me to delete the data? How can I ensure that the data gets deleted when I request it to be deleted?

6. Do you monetize the data in any way, and if so, am I entitled to compensation for it?

I don't know of many (if any) data collection schemes that meet this bar, yet.

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

#229

Post by TeMPOraL »

yeahforsureman wrote: post #195
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.

I know consent is only one of the possible bases. My comment was not about GDPR per se. I mentioned this law because of the spirit behind it - the law itself sets the bar very low (arguably below the point of what I'd consider ethical behavior). The other reason I mentioned it is because GDPR is currently the only stick we (at least, some of us) have to push back on the invasive telemetry. It's not nearly enough.

GDPR notwithstanding, I'm of firm belief that any kind of telemetry in software should be strictly opt-in and require informed consent. I say should, it's an ethical view, not legal.

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

#230

Post by wtetzner »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #122
nxpnsv wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> But if analytics is helpful, (...) [opt-in telemetry] would be horrible too I don't question that analytics can be helpful. I do question the degree to which it is, relative to other methods of gaining the same insights (such as better QA, user panels, surveying people, etc.). I also don't think it would be horrible too. Inconvenient, yes. But horrible? People used to ship working software before opt-out analytics…

People shipped software before users had internet connections.
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