Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

Finding the collection of a person's data without consent unethical is not an "extreme position". Since when "consent" or more correctly "autonomy of individual" is called "extreme"? If you did the same thing in my field (medicine), you would lose your license.

There are essential, fire-extinguisher-like features. The canonical example is the joke about backup software: if it were developed according to today's standard of telemetry-driven engagement analytics, the restore from backup functionality would be removed because it's used so infrequently.

This actually happens sometimes: when developing the demo ".kkrieger", a first-person 3D shooter in 96 KiB, demogroup theprodukkt tried to shrink it down to get it under the 96 KiB wire. One of the tricks they used was using a profiler to identify code sections that were never reached and could be removed. One of the sections they removed was the handler for the up arrow key in the main menu, simply because the test player never pressed up in the menu.

If you think that Google or another large software organization won't misuse telemetry by cutting or neglecting important but infrequently used functionality to hit some KPI... have you ever worked in a large software organization?

All stats can be deanonymized. The more data you make available, the more you identify yourself. I do not need software I use stealthily tying up bandwidth by "phoning home" with data about me. It is simultaneously betrayal and resource theft. If I wanted to contribute to the improvement of the software, I'd file a bug report.

> I am jaded and probably being a little uncharitable. However, I don't know Russ personally so I have no reason to place a high level of confidence that a Google employee isn't going to make decisions that align more with Google's interests vs privacy interests.

If the nature of this data were different, I would be suspicious too. But it's really hard for me to see how a set of counters (whose names have various protections to ensure they can't contain private information) being sent approximately once a year is going to help with Google's advertising interests (which is what I assume you meant by "Google's interests"; I think they also have an interest in making Go better and the telemetry proposal aligns with that). This is literally the first time I've been OK with telemetry.

> Regardless, there are plenty of ways to upgrade the Go tool chain (snaps, distro packages, fetching latest via curl, etc) that won't result in the changes being immediately visible. Given that, I think you are painting an overly optimistic picture of a world though where everyone that cares about this is going to be immediately aware that opt-out telemetry has been added vs a lot of installs being silently swept up into this by sheer ignorance.

I agree there will be people who won't notice the disclosure (which will also be in the release notes), but again I tend to think that the people sniffing network traffic after installing a program would also scrutinize release notes instead of just blindly installing upgrades, which is why I find it pretty improbable that Russ' explanation was a pretext.

> Also, this is going to require me to go and set environment variables in about a dozen environments to disable the collection and while I can pretty easily manage that task via ansible I'm not happy about having to jump through hoops to turn off telemetry for a freaking compiler tool chain.

I think the best suggestion I've seen is that there should be a single environment variable (e.g. $TELEMETRY) that all programs should respect, to avoid the need to do work for every application.

I don't think it's all telemetry. I suppose telemetry could be designed in a way that preserves the users privacy to an extent that is compatible with their native assumption. I suppose that design also depends on what you're building.

If you're building a website, I think it's fairly reasonable for you to store my IP. That's inside my expected privacy loss when dealing with a remote party. I have to connect to your computer, much like i have to physically walk into a store. I don't mind you remembering that I was there. Running a compiler on the other hand feels more "private" to me somehow. My expectation when using a compiler is that it won't send anything to anyone, because why would it?

In general I think our industry is starved for relevant and foundational ethics research, outside of the FSF at least.

I agree, that's not what I think was extreme about your position. I think you've invented straw men in this comment and your previous comment.