GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#21

Post by nottorp » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 12:56 PM UTC

neobrain wrote: post #3

tl;dr for opt-out as per https://cli.github.com/telemetry#how-to-opt-out (any of these work individually): export GH_TELEMETRY=false export DO_NOT_TRACK=true gh config set telemetry disabled (starting from version 2.91.0, which this announcement refers to)

... don't forget to recheck this info every update, restore flags that have been "accidentally" reset and set any new flags that they added for "different" telemetry

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#22

Post by embedding-shape » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 12:57 PM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #19

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

This is where (surprise surprise) I respect Valve. The hardware survey is opt in and transparent. They get useful info out of it and it’s just..not scummy. There are all sorts of best practices for getting info without vacuuming up everyone’s data in opaque ways.

To be fair, you can be pretty sure they're heavily leveraging all their store data, in loads of ways. They probably sit on the biggest dataset of video game preferences for people in general, and I'm betting they make use of it heavily.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#23

Post by gardaani » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

It isn't only corporate development teams — open source development teams want to spy on their users, too. For instance, Homebrew: "Anonymous analytics allow us to prioritise fixes and features based on how, where and when people use Homebrew." [1]

[1] https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#24

Post by traceroute66 » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

I suggest anyone who cares, and certainly anybody in the EU mails privacy@github.com and also opens a support ticket to let them know exactly what you think

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#25

Post by mghackerlady » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

can someone explain why github has a CLI? why wouldn't you just use git?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#26

Post by bakies » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

So happy I deployed gitea to my homelab last month. It's got an import feature from github and honestly just faster and better uptime that github. Claude can use it just fine with tea cli and git. It's pretty much a knockoff github, but I think it's better so far.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#27

Post by ImJasonH » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

Do people think that GitHub isn't already collecting and aggregating all the requests sent to their servers, which is after all the entire point of the gh CLI?

If you don't want your requests tracked, you're going to have to opt out of a lot more than this one setting.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#28

Post by falcor84 » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

sammy2255 wrote: post #13

Today I learned GitHub has a CLI. I guess that's like Pornhub having a CLI

Seeing how annoying their website interfaces are, I'd actually be open to paying for API/CLI access to porn.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#29

Post by bakies » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #25

can someone explain why github has a CLI? why wouldn't you just use git?

PRs, and managing repos, and other things that aren't git features. You can use it to auth with GITHUB_TOKEN instead of ssh or http. Which is how my agents get access. I've switched to gitea, it's got all the same features.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#30

Post by salomonk_mur » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #19

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

This is where (surprise surprise) I respect Valve. The hardware survey is opt in and transparent. They get useful info out of it and it’s just..not scummy. There are all sorts of best practices for getting info without vacuuming up everyone’s data in opaque ways.

They are analyzing absolutely every click you make, I can guarantee it.