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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#191

Post by lamasery »

embedding-shape wrote: post #185
lamasery wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deeply hate that this attitude took over even among “hackers”. Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware. Tracking what I do on my own computer doesn’t stop being spying because the program I’m doing stuff in can make network requests. WTF.

> Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware. Well, I was mainly talking about network requests, which are quite literally served by "my hardware" when your client reaches out to my servers, and they agree to serve your client. I do agree that it sucks that browser viewports now also are considered "mine" from t…

Yeah server logs don’t bother me. I’m requesting a resource, you unavoidably see that happen.

The attitude that’s changed is that in the 90s and 00s a program that sent information about what you’re doing that wasn’t necessary and expected for how it operates would have been instantly, popularly, and unequivocally labeled spyware by a programmer crowd. Now it’s normal and you get a bunch of folks claiming it’s ok.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#192

Post by naikrovek »

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…

I'm curious why people think this is in the same ballpark as that something like a private investigator can do. This isn't spying at all.

"oh no, they're aware of someone at the computer 19416146-F56B-49E4-BF16-C0D8B337BF7F running `gh api` a lot! that's spying!"

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#193

Post by tomrod »

Sytten wrote: post #61
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…

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.

Teams that do this need to just dogfood internally. Once you start collecting telemetry on external users defaulted to opt-in you're not a good faith actor in the ecosystem.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#194

Post by chrishill89 »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #172
dale_glass wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does. And this is exactly where disconnects happen, and where you need telemetry or something like it to tell you how your users actually use the system, rather than imagining how they should. A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file". A novice thinks "I want to…

It’s total waste of time because both are going to be maintained in perpetuity. Increasing the maintenance burden and attack surface of git. “a novice thinks” Just learn your damn tools and stop whining.

The git-restore(1) implementation looks like about 35 lines of code. Then add a little more complexity for some apparent common functions that needed to be factored out.

For a dedicated "restore" it's worth it to me... (who will not maintain it)

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#195

Post by naikrovek »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #171

Do they mean "pseudonymous" telemetry meaning "non-identifying telemetry", or do they mean "pseudoanonymous" telemetry meaning telemetry is that not really anonymous? Those two words have almost exactly opposite meanings, and as stated, they are literally saying they are collecting identifiable data.

it means they can see all the telemetry from a single machine, but the identity of the machine is not tied to any human identity or github account. each machine appears to get its own UUID and that's how they "identify" machines.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#196

Post by junon »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #182
hombre_fatal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data. Usage data is the ground truth. Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions. The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.

It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove because it's infrequently used.

This. If I'm forced to use a feature I hate because it's the only way to do something, the "ground truth" reflects that I like that feature. It doesn't tell the whole story.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#197

Post by throwaranay4933 »

lukewarm707 wrote: post #150

#Telemetry FUCK OFF export DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 export ASTRO_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export GATSBY_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 export NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export DISABLE_ZAPIER_ANALYTICS=1 export TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export GH_TELEMETRY=false

Also:

  # Atlas
  export DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1
  # CloudFlare
  export WRANGLER_SEND_METRICS=false
  export VERCEL_PLUGIN_TELEMETRY=off
  # AWS
  export SAM_CLI_TELEMETRY=0
  export CDK_DISABLE_CLI_TELEMETRY=true
  # ???
  export DO_NOT_TRACK=true

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#198

Post by poulpy123 »

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…

The current IA boom is entirely based on data . The more data you have the more you can train and the more money you make

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#199

Post by rienbdj »

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…

When allocating engineering spend you need to predict impact. If you know how features of GitHub CLI are used and how you can do this more easily.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#200

Post by naikrovek »

grugdev42 wrote: post #38

Remember that thing Microsoft does? Embrace, extend, extinguish. The first two have been done. I give it five years before the GH CLI is the only way to interact with GitHub repos. Then the third will also be done, and the cycle is complete.

people that say things like this are exhausting. exhausting. You make it so very easy to classify you straight into the "looney" bin. People said that WSL was EEE for Linux. when that didn't happen, people said that WSL gaining GPU support was EEE. When that didn't happen, people said that WSLg was EEE for Linux. People said that Powershell was EEE for Windows.

None of these happened. none of them even appear to have happened, and none of them appear to have even been planned. It's all a hallucination by people that talk like this. It's all imaginary. Show me any evidence of anything like this. ANY AT ALL. Not a hunch, not something that could be interpreted that way, show me the very clear and repeatable steps that Microsoft used in the 90s to EEE something in anything they're doing today.

They're too busy copiloting everything and arguing with each other to do this. Show me Microsoft Git with extra features over the open source version. Show me Microsoft Linux with extra features over the open source version. Show me Microsoft ANYTHING with extra features over the open source version they copied, and show me the doors slowly closing behind me. You can't. Because it isn't happening.

git repos can't be locked up in the way you're describing. github is a wrapper around git. it would take an enormous amount of work for microsoft to change this fundamental decision in the design of github. GitHub is a git server, over both HTTP and SSH. These are core decisions of the software that everything else sits on top of. If pulling git repos over HTTP or SSH ever stops being supported, so many things are going to stop being supported, that it just won't be useful at all after that point.

the gh cli makes api calls, that's all. it just makes api calls easier. it exposes a lot of api calls as friendly commands. it's not something that most of github users are even aware of, much less use. gh is not going to lock someone into a github "ecosystem" A) because such a thing doesn't exist and B) again, most people don't use it.

Microsoft is far more likely to kill GitHub because of people with MBAs (aka "morons") who somehow call the shots in business these days. They are not going to pilot into the ground by EEE. They are going to pilot it into the ground because they don't know what they're doing, and they don't know what users want or what they like. That will be the fate of GitHub; incompetence will kill it, not cold, calculating, nefarious competence.

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