211–220 of 314 posts
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What world do you live in?
A custom-built Gentoo that uses the Awesome Window Manager for a minimal install, builds Firefox from source, and uses OpenSnitch to sniff everything . My machine is locked down hard. Oh, and I checked what depends on Go on my machine. The one kicker was libcap, which won't depend on Go if I tell it not to build captree. So I did that. I uninstalled Docker. That leaves: * `arduino-builder` (for my custom keyboard). *…
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I think the comparison of telemetry and stealing is pretty harsh. Is opt-out telemetry unethical ... depends. If you use it in a privacy preserving way no, if you spy on your Users, sell the data for money or advertising obviously it is unethical. The hard truth is, nobody reads the manual. Opt in telemetry is often a minority, and you then work with niche data for a minority that influences your development in certa…
It really all boils down to meaningful consent. > if you spy on your Users In my opinion, any data collection about me or my machines that occurs without my active informed consent is "spying". This is my fundamental problem with opt-out mechanisms. They do not indicate or imply that active consent was obtained.
Would that be enough for you?
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But that's wrong. There is no position for this in a civilised society: "If we ask everyone is going to say no, so we will steal it unless someone tells us not to"
That’s not their argument. They say if you ask everyone if it is ok most just ignore your question.
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That’s not their argument. They say if you ask everyone if it is ok most just ignore your question.
That's how they presented their argument. It can be presented both ways depending on how you want to promote it.
Very much against this. Sure, it sounds naive enough, and can give reasons why. But I have 3,436 items in /usr/bin. What if -every- one of these started doing their own telemetry, their own envvars, etc? If we have to deal with telemetry, then I'd instead hope that there can exist a single telemetry systemwide interface. Not sure how that would be designed or implemented, but would be better than everyone doing their…
> " What if -every- one of these started doing their own telemetry, their own envvars, etc? " What bad thing are you suggesting would happen if they did? Your computer and internet connection can't handle four thousand strings or four thousand HTTP POSTS, or four MB more disk space of telemetry libraries? I bet it can. This isn't a technical problem, it's a control and consent problem.
If I get access to detailed metrics from go, gcc, make, tar, gzip, bash, python... of course I can tell which programs you have been running (and frankly, I'm disgusted)
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A custom-built Gentoo that uses the Awesome Window Manager for a minimal install, builds Firefox from source, and uses OpenSnitch to sniff everything . My machine is locked down hard. Oh, and I checked what depends on Go on my machine. The one kicker was libcap, which won't depend on Go if I tell it not to build captree. So I did that. I uninstalled Docker. That leaves: * `arduino-builder` (for my custom keyboard). *…
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I can customize installed packages, such as what I did above.
Also, it taught me system administration.
Totally worth the effort.
As for getting rid of Go, I'm surprised that I had so few Go programs, and like I said, I was already planning on replacing two with my own stuff.
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IANAL but European law is nuanced over whether IP addresses are PII. If I'm not mistaken it's been ruled they are for ISPs, rationale being they have enough other data points that once correlated with IP addresses allow to identify individuals. Whether the same applies to Google (I suppose) is definitely not clear to me.
The proposal explicitly says they don't collect IP addresses or _any_ unique identifiers.
Nope, nope, and more nope. You're not moving the Overton Window any more on me. In fact it seems there's a clear correlation between the quality of software and how much spyware there is embedded in it. It's often merely another way to justify unpopular changes with "but the data says so". IMHO if you want to collect any information, it should never be anything but opt-in, a conscious decision.
> IMHO if you want to collect any information, it should never be anything but opt-in, a conscious decision. Serious (general) question: How do you do that given a non-technical user population? Debian’s opt-in popcon kind of manages to get a little bit of data from a fairly technical one, but nowhere near enough to estimate a low usage frequency, and it’s the only opt-in program I’m aware of that gets anything usabl…
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The proposal explicitly says they don't collect IP addresses or _any_ unique identifiers.
As far as I'm aware/recall, European privacy laws consider any connection back to a telemetry server to count as "collecting" IP addresses, since the telemetry server learns it (even if they pinky swear not to write it down.)
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Most software features are not like fire extinguishers. More than that, the interesting stats may be not even around user-visible features, but around internal mechanisms, like some cache hit rate, or how often is some branch in the compiler invoked. As long as stats are clearly inspectable, reasonably anonymized, and are opt-out, I'd be fine with sending them.
The features that are like fire extinguishers are the ones most likely to be unjustly removed with the rationale of looking at telemetry. See for example Mozilla's bizarre decision to remove the ability to change the override the character encoding of a webpage with some half-baked detector.