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Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

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Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#261

Post by bombela »

throw7777 wrote: post #145
bombela wrote: post #68

The information and rate of upload as described seem reasonable. Is the fear from most people that it will be a foot in the door? And a way for Google to collect extra overtime? Note: I think Go is a regressive technology. That would have been great in 1970s. Not today. But that's a different topic. My point is that I tend to be biased very negatively against Go. But here I don't see something wrong.

Interested as to why you believe go is regressive, could you expand on that?

You can find plenty of well articulated rant online. The gist is Go ignores all research in programming languages. Is very hard to use properly. It is really hard to produce safe APIs. You are encouraged to pop threads (preemptive user threads) all over the place. And may the god of lost state saves you from the hell of data races. Also what is this slice/vector type thing? Don't forget to check `err`, nope not this one, the other one.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#262

Post by eps »

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)

If it collects actionable data, yes, of course it works.

Crashes, common failures, UI/UX friction points, avarage usage patterns - all can be used to prioritize work to take care of things that have the biggest impact.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#263

Post by nyberg »

slimsag wrote: post #23

I've been a pretty strong advocate of the idea that analytics should always be minimal, 100% anonymous, aggregated, and open to the public - otherwise it’s spying. This is how we do analytics on our websites today[0][1], and how we plan to do it in games we release in the future. Maybe one day I will start a dedicated FOSS service that people can use for exactly this with some trusted reputation/transparency/auditabi…

Opt-in should be the default where the tool asks for consent politely. Information on how the application is being interacted with belongs to the user not the developer thus it should favour their choice over sneakily enabling it for those that didn't pay attention or don't understand it.

It's on the project to convince the user to turn on telemetry rather than the user having to remember to turn it off. Excuses such as "nobody would turn it on" don't apply.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#264

Post by musicale »

JohnFen wrote: post #42
mananaysiempre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What I hear you saying here is that people don't do what you want if you give them the choice, so you lean towards not giving them the choice rather than respecting their wishes. Is my interpretation correct?

> people don't do what you want if you give them the choice, so you lean towards not giving them the choice rather than respecting their wishes

This nicely summarizes a very popular approach to telemetry – and to a variety of user-hostile behaviors. Web sites (for example) seem to have mastered the "fight against user preferences" approach, trying to play video when autoplay is blocked, using javascript modals since pop-up windows are blocked, fighting ad blockers, ignoring "do not track", etc..

If users are given any choice, usually it's a difficult opt-out process, which is more effective precisely because it makes it harder for users to make the choice that you don't want them to make, even if it isn't their actual preference. For an extreme example, see Facebook's (anti) privacy settings. Commonly used dark patterns further amplify user manipulation.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#265

Post by rogpeppe1 »

eps wrote: post #260
badrequest wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you use compiler telemetry to spy on people?

Working hours, work location, home location, favourite cafes, sick days, vacations, hotels, wealth level. And that's just from IP addresses and timestamps alone, and without cross-referencing with all the data that Google vacuums over other channels.

That ship has already sailed. The Go tool already by default makes network requests to the Go proxy, which potentially allows everything that you're talking about there. What's significantly different about this telemetry proposal?

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#266

Post by lispegistus »

Setting aside the question if on by default telemetry is unethical in general, I personally think it is, my point in this comment is that in the context of open source it is impossible for it to be because:

The whole point of open source is the security of the rights and freedoms of the users, and in case of a conflict with the convenience of the developers, the user rights take priority EVERY TIME. If you're not ok with this, you should not write open source software. If nobody opts in to your telemetry scheme if it were the default to choose, too bad, you're just gonna have to live with it and respect user choice no matter how inconvenient or how much better the alternative would be for everyone. If you fail to grasp this very basic thing you will be better served working on proprietary products instead. OSS is not a product you own, it's a shared resource you are in charge of stewarding and the ethical burden is much higher because of that. I checked, Go uses a permissive license, Google is more than welcome to run a proprietary fork with telemetry built in. Keep that out of open source.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#267

Post by mort96 »

rogpeppe1 wrote: post #265
eps wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working hours, work location, home location, favourite cafes, sick days, vacations, hotels, wealth level. And that's just from IP addresses and timestamps alone, and without cross-referencing with all the data that Google vacuums over other channels.

That ship has already sailed. The Go tool already by default makes network requests to the Go proxy, which potentially allows everything that you're talking about there. What's significantly different about this telemetry proposal?

A couple things IMO.

First, making network requests when downloading packages is necessary for the tool to function and unavoidable. People who care about this will be using a VPN of some kind. It's just how the Internet works. But telemetry is something the tool author is choosing to add, not something that's necessary due to the architecture of our computing infrastructure.

Second, the Go telemetry would apparently create a unique, persistent user ID. Normal Internet use doesn't, there's just the IP address which is different from location to location, shared by a bunch of people behind the NAT, and can be masked using common tools.

And yeah, I know this is "anonymised"... but if you have one user ID which uses Go sometimes with an IP address from a particular apartment complex land sometimes from a particular office space, finding out which individual that user ID belongs to is trivial.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#268

Post by 0xjnml »

bombela wrote: post #261
throw7777 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interested as to why you believe go is regressive, could you expand on that?

You can find plenty of well articulated rant online. The gist is Go ignores all research in programming languages. Is very hard to use properly. It is really hard to produce safe APIs. You are encouraged to pop threads (preemptive user threads) all over the place. And may the god of lost state saves you from the hell of data races. Also what is this slice/vector type thing? Don't forget to check `err`, nope not this…

> The gist is Go ignores all research in programming languages.

This is an assumption and it's IMHO false. Go creators watched all the research, probably closely, lived with its results and were not happy with what they get. Their experience reminded them that less features in a PL make it arguably less expressive, sure, but in the same time it makes it faster to learn and master, easier to read and debug. Writing tools is simpler if a parser for your language can be hacked over the weekend from scratch, etc.

At the end of the day its a matter of personal preferences, but it has, IMO, nothing to do with "ignoring all research in programming languages", quite the opposite.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#269

Post by simoncion »

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.

If folks were using just their eyes, they'd be calling users in to watch them interact with the software, calling users up to perform user surveys, doing all sorts of live-user testing.

But, that costs money: folks don't generally like to do surveys for free, don't like to come to your site (or have you come to theirs) for free, don't like to participate in tests for free... and the caliber of person who can design and orchestrate all that is _notably_ expensive.

So, companies have discovered that it's far, far cheaper to shove remote eyes into their products. No need to schedule user observation sessions, pay for transportation and participation, have to bother with hiring people who are capable of coming up with a good set of questions and scenarios to walk through.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#270

Post by simoncion »

BonoboIO wrote: post #212
JohnFen wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Flash screen at installtime that logging is on an you can disable it in the settings. Would that be enough for you?

Unless a Windows user is installing the software, that screen would be displayed in approximately zero of the cases where a package manager was used to install the software. Similarly, exactly zero widely-used Docker images that contain the software would display this splash screen, as the software would already have been installed.

In short, unless you're a Windows user there are so __very__ many ways to install software that aren't "Go to the project home page, download a generic install binary, run that binary with world-write permissions.". Aside from very small-time projects, I can't think of the last time I used an officially-maintained install script that I got from the project's servers to install something.

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