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Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.
Then you can either: 1) don't use the software 2) analyze the software source code to understand what it does before using it I tend and prefer to assume good-will WRT telemetry in well-known and independent opensource projects.
Sure, people don't pay for things like Homebrew (can they even?) - but this is no reason to extract resources from end users without their consent or agency.
I have to work very hard to get something like Homebrew installed and in-use in my organization - the IT guys detest it, since they don't have the wherewithal to understand it (or else they'd be higher-paid developers) so when I finally do get it installed and in use (because it is a very productive tool), having it phone home just makes the situation worse. IT guys have asked for my blood on more than one occasion, just because they see something 'uncontrollable' phoning home .. this does a lot more harm than good.
That said, homebrew has been absolutely responsible for making MacOS usable for development purposes in this ol' hackers lab, so I'll keep using it - but I sure do wish they'd care a little more about the position they put us in, having to justify the use of it to IT guys ..
EDIT: Thinking about it, I'm actually not averse to phoning-home, just the automatic/hidden nature of it. If brew asked me, every 5 or so times that I ran it, if I would like to participate in sending anonymized analytics to the brew devs, and showed me what was being sent (instead of obfuscating it), I'd be a lot more inclined to click "[Yes] - this one time" almost every single time ..
> Homebrew’s analytics are now sent both to Google Analytics and our new, self-hosted InfluxDB instance hosted in the EU. > If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS because you didn’t like Google Analytics and/or data being sent to the USA: please consider unsetting this and setting HOMEBREW_NO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS instead, allowing analytics data to be sent to our new InfluxDB host. My package manager was reporti…
They'd be well advised to make this opt-in only for legal reasons. This is not going to go down well in a lot of places and they might get exposed to law suits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.
Then you can either: 1) don't use the software 2) analyze the software source code to understand what it does before using it I tend and prefer to assume good-will WRT telemetry in well-known and independent opensource projects.
Excellent! Thanks to the brew team for this — it was always frustrating to install something and have to wait for a full, slow update first.
I wish we could get the industry to understand that when you build-in analytics and make it hard for people to opt out, you're using their resources. Sure, people don't pay for things like Homebrew (can they even?) - but this is no reason to extract resources from end users without their consent or agency. I have to work very hard to get something like Homebrew installed and in-use in my organization - the IT guys de…
They can and should! https://github.com/homebrew/brew#donations
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Why don't they just use something like plausible for this? I switch to plausible for all my analytics and it works great. https://plausible.io/
Whilst Plausible does look great, one of their main goals, as I understand it, is to focus on simple core analytics for websites, not general-purpose do-it-all analytics for everything. If you're not a website, and so your metrics are arbitrary events with metadata instead of page views, this tends to quickly run into awkward mess. Self hosting an InfluxDB to capture core metrics seems like a good solution that avoid…
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In your .bashrc or similar: export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1
That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.
> Homebrew gathers anonymous aggregate user behaviour analytics using Google Analytics (until our in-progress migration to our own InfluxDB). You will be notified the first time you run brew update or install Homebrew. Analytics are not enabled until after this notice is shown, to ensure that you can opt out without ever sending analytics data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.
Then you can either: 1) don't use the software 2) analyze the software source code to understand what it does before using it I tend and prefer to assume good-will WRT telemetry in well-known and independent opensource projects.
> Homebrew’s analytics are now sent both to Google Analytics and our new, self-hosted InfluxDB instance hosted in the EU. > If you had previously set HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS because you didn’t like Google Analytics and/or data being sent to the USA: please consider unsetting this and setting HOMEBREW_NO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS instead, allowing analytics data to be sent to our new InfluxDB host. My package manager was reporti…
export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1
immediately!