Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

Post by JetSpiegel » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 1:25 AM UTC

tveita wrote: post #209

alyandon wrote: post #54

Oh Google - never stop being you. Not only is it going to be opt-out (because of course it would be coming from Google), I really like the whole "wait a week before sending telemetry" part that just coincidentally has the benefit of sneaking right past people that actively look for suspicious network activity when they've freshly installed something. Am I being uncharitable?

Google is institutionally incapable of producing software that doesn't track its users over the internet. One example is the stock calculator app on Android, which according to their privacy statement may track your app interactions, device id, and email. Like what if users actually subtract more than they add or something. https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.... Or the wallpapers they include…

Post by remram » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 1:27 AM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #78

marginalia_nu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. It does sort of hinge on the highly suspect assumption that usefulness is correlated with use. An obvious counter-example to this is something like a fire-extinguisher, which will in the ideal case just sit on a wall until it's use-by date passes and then it's discarded having never been used; or on the flip side, an incredi…

All this boils down to "an unskilled engineer will misinterpret data even if they have it". I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. There's a lot of very simple questions you can answer very reliably, too, like "what proportion of the users are still using a certain compatibility flag".

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

mh7 wrote: post #104

cube2222 wrote: post #69

Probably related to[0]. To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. They don't disable it when prompted, nor would they enable it manually. The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. For this you need a good and balanced sample of your users. You do…

Any evidence that telemetry actually works? (i.e makes the program better)

Post by ptx » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:07 AM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #80

alyandon wrote: post #54

Oh Google - never stop being you. Not only is it going to be opt-out (because of course it would be coming from Google), I really like the whole "wait a week before sending telemetry" part that just coincidentally has the benefit of sneaking right past people that actively look for suspicious network activity when they've freshly installed something. Am I being uncharitable?

Very popular programming language and IDE have telemetry on by default, VSCode, C#, Java etc ... People act like they discover telemetry in 2023. I don't think it's a big deal, ultimately it's to improve Go and the proposal makes it very easy to disable it ( single env variable ).

Post by stonogo » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

philosopher1234 wrote: post #220

marginalia_nu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We cant solve this problem by carving out our eyes. We must adapt to having data about the world.