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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#131

Post by vlovich123 »

nkrisc wrote: post #119
DrScientist wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data. Excellent point. > but if it’s not entirely opt-in, I think it is effectively spying no matter what you’re collecting, varying only along a dimension of invasiveness. Every web page visit is logged on the http server, and that's been the default since the mid 1990's. Is that spying?

In principle, yes, I believe it is a form of spying. Not particularly invasive nor harmful, but spying nonetheless. Logging every page visited is not a technical requirement of serving the requested resource.

> Logging every page visited is not a technical requirement of serving the requested resource.

How will you know which page is having problems being served or is having performance problems?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#132

Post by xpe »

varispeed wrote: post #40

pseudoanonymous = euphemism for not anonoymous. Regulators should wake up and fine them hard, so hard to become existential. Make an example for others not to follow.

Being a good regulator is about solving a nearly impossible satisficing problem. You have to follow the law and achieve achieve results with a limited budget and political constraints. Given the priorities of say the FTC or state AGs or the SEC, I don't think GitHub is even a blip on their radar. Of any of the regulators I would hazard to guess that maybe the California Privacy Protection Agency is the most likely to prioritize a look, but I still doubt it.

I know lots of idealists -- I went to a public policy school. And in some areas, I am one myself. We need them; they can push for their causes.

But if you ever find yourself working as a regulator, you'll find the world is complicated and messy. Regulators that overreach often make things worse for their very causes they support.

If you haven't yet, go find some regulators that have to take companies all the way to court and win. I have know some in certain fields. Learn from them. Some would probably really enjoy getting to talk to a disinterested third-party to learn the domain. There are even ways to get involved as a sort of citizen journalist if you want.

But these sort of blanket calls for "make an example of GitHub" are probably a waste of time. I think a broader view is needed here. Think about the causal chain of problems and find a link where you have leverage. Then focus your effort on that link.

I live in the DC area, where ignorance of how the government works leads to people walking away and not taking you seriously. When tech people put comparable effort into understanding the machinery of government that they do into technology, that is awesome. There are some amazing examples of this if you look around.

There are no excuses. Tech people readily accept that they have to work around the warts of their infrastructure. (We are often lucky because we get to rebuild so much software ourselves.) But we forget what it's like to work with systems that have to resist change because they are coordination points between multiple stakeholders. The conflict is by design!

Anyhow, we have no excuse to blame the warts in our governmental system. You either fix them or work around them or both.

The world is a big broken machine. Almost no individual person is to blame. You just have to understand where to turn the wrench.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#133

Post by larusso »

ubercore wrote: post #76
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

It makes me think, what `gh` features don't generate some activity in the github API that could as easily guide feature development without adding extra telemetry?

Yeah. Unless they plan to move more local git operations in the tool and blur the line between git and gh.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#134

Post by kalleboo »

jubilanti wrote: post #118
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points. And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure. It…

Apple and Microsoft reached their peak usability when they employed teams of people to literally sit and watch what users did in real life (and listen to them narrating what they want to do), take notes, and ask followup questions.

Everything went to crap in the metric-based era that followed.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#135

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #105
johnfn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

> Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, ha…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#136

Post by ulbu »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #84
ForHackernews wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI means "user interface". For a CLI tool the UI is the commands and modifiers it offers on the terminal.

i lump those into user experience (UX) stuff as it’s more leaning towards “flow of user action” etc.

ok, you do, doesn’t mean that the difference others make of it are necessarily wrong, as the tone of your first comment suggested.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#137

Post by ambicapter »

johnfn wrote: post #103
embedding-shape wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and…

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

> with perfect precision.

Precision isn't accuracy and all that.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#138

Post by rafram »

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…

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry

Yes, probably. Git is seriously hard to use beyond basic tasks. It has a byzantine array of commands, and the "porcelain" feels a lot closer to "plumbing" than it should. You and I are used to it, but that doesn't make it good.

I mean, it took 14 years before it gained a `switch` command! `checkout` and `reset` can do like six different things depending on how your arguments resolve, from nondestructive to very, very destructive; safe(r) operations like --force-with-lease are made harder to find than their more dangerous counterparts; it's a mess.

Analytics alone wouldn't solve the problem - you also need a team of developers who are willing to listen to their users, pore through usage data, and prioritize UX - but it would be something.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#139

Post by embedding-shape »

lamasery wrote: post #104
lukevp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was running a physical business and I wrote down each person’s name and credit card number and the exact time and order they placed, that would be pretty invasive and “spying”. If I write down how many units I sold of each item per day, and the volume of transactions by credit card vs cash, it’s anonymized and I don’t think this would generally be considered “spying”, just normal business metrics. How’s the latt…

Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying. Aggregating request statistics server-side unless you're only generating those requests to spy on what I'm doing on my computer is more like the not-spying you're talking about.

> Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying.

I agree, but once you cross the borders out to the internet, I'd say you need to stop seeing that as "Me sitting at my computer at home", because you're actually "on someone else's property" at that point essentially. And I say this as someone who care greatly about preserving personal privacy.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#140

Post by alexchantavy »

jubilanti wrote: post #118
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points. And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure. It…

The problem they're trying to solve is to find out what functions of their software are most useful for people and what to invest in, and to make directions on product direction.

Yes, vendors can, do, and should talk to users, but then a lot of users don't like receiving cold messages from vendors (and some users go so far as to say that cold messages should _never_ be sent).

So, the alternative is to collect some soft telemetry to get usage metrics. As long as a company is upfront about it and provides an opt-out mechanism, I don't see a problem with it. Software projects (and the businesses around them) die if they don't make the right decisions.

As an open source author and maintainer, I very rarely hear from my users unless I put in the legwork to reach out to them so I completely identify with this.

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