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Homebrew 4.0.0

brew.sh

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Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#21

Post by dmak »

Kelteseth wrote: post #4
stjo wrote: post #2

> 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…

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/

Thanks for sharing. I was looking for other options and this looks like a good candidate. Does you or anyone else have any other suggestions?

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#22

Post by febstar »

modernerd wrote: post #15

> brew update will now be run automatically less often (every 24 hours rather than every 5 minutes) and these auto-updates will be much faster as they no longer need to perform the slow git fetch of the huge homebrew/core and homebrew/cask taps’ Git repositories. 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.

> no longer need to perform the slow git fetch

Nice. Rust Cargo is also trialling out something similar.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#24

Post by pimterry »

Kelteseth wrote: post #17
pimterry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is fine for medium size applications, you do have to register all events (goals) on the website before you can use them [0]. I have written the Qt/QML plugin for plausible [1], I don't think predefining them is too bad. [0] https://plausible.io/docs/goal-conversions [1] https://gitlab.com/kelteseth/qml-plausible

Ah, neat, ok! I'll take another look. For now I've been testing out Posthog (https://posthog.com). They seem more focused on this use case - they let you do arbitrary queries and build graphs over all event data without having to predefine goals or anything, and they have an open-source & self-hostable version, in addition to a EU-hosted cloud option. Now that GA is so clearly dying (finally) it's an exciting space!

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#25

Post by Xylakant »

nicbou wrote: post #9
predmijat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.

You know, as the law requires in the EU

That is a very simplifying view of the legal situation and that's not helpful at all.

First, it only applies if you collect PII - depending on what they collect, they might not be subject to the GDPR at all.

Second, informed consent is only one of the options that allows collection and storage of PII. There are various other reason that allow collection and storage of PII, among them "Legitimate interest". For example, it is considered legitimate to store webserver logs containing PII (IP Addresses) for purposes of fraud analysis, unauthorized system access etc. Whether a specific collection of data is legitimate under those clauses depends on the specifics of a case (who has access, what's the exact purpose, how long you store, ...) - ask a lawyer if you need an assessment.

Depending on what they log and how they log, they may be either in the clear or in a bad place, but it's definitely not as simple as "the law requires no logging".

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#26

Post by daneel_w »

glenngillen wrote: post #19
darkwater wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Little Snitch to alert on any outbound connections and make a decision. The google stuff immediately got a permanent blackhole for Homebrew. Anything I'm uncertain of I'll give a short-term approval (30mins) to not break anything. After a couple of rounds of execution (and sometimes some trial & error) you can usually work out which requests are essential and which are some notifications/tracking thing.

So you didn't see the notice brew(1) gives you on first run?

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#27

Post by Mystery-Machine »

aa-jv wrote: post #12

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…

Isn't it illegal, under GDPR, to track users without their consent?

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#28

Post by st3fan »

Before this whole threads turns into a misinformed rant fest about opt out telemetry:

“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.”

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#29

Post by pimterry »

nicbou wrote: post #9
predmijat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.

You know, as the law requires in the EU

I don't think that's true - AFAICT there's no EU law banning analytics. EU law just restricts storing & processing _personal_ data (GDPR) and storing unnecessary data on machines without consent (ePrivacy/'cookie law').

If you want to log fully anonymized data, without persistent tracking ids and without leaking personal data to 3rd parties en route (so no "send it to Google and they promise to anonymize the IP afterwards") then you're all good (but IANAL!).

The only reason you see all those cookie notices and GDPR consent requests is because so few companies are willing to accept even the tiniest tradeoff in their metrics to protect their users' privacy.

Re: Homebrew 4.0.0

#30

Post by sandstrom »

nicbou wrote: post #9
predmijat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the point. I don’t want any software sending analytics unless I specifically allowed it.

You know, as the law requires in the EU

I don't think the law is applicable to a software project. For example, GDPR is applicable to organisations that are processing personal data.

I'm fairly sure that an open-source piece of code that you download and install yourself isn't in scope.

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