Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

How transparent is Scarf's product adoption metrics for OSS projects? https://about.scarf.sh/

I follow them on Twitter but haven't looked much into it other than reading their documentation, which makes me think that most of their telemetry is done at the point of the package distribution system: https://about.scarf.sh/package-sdks

This is well done. It only exposes counters, and rather then pushing data up, the telemetry server must know the names of what it can ask for. No wildcards.

> Although the report would not include any identifiers, the TCP connection uploading the report would expose the system’s public IP address to the server if a proxy is not being used. This IP address would not be associated with the uploaded reports in any way.

Any fully transparent data collection is going to have to include IP addresses and timestamps. Even if the IP isn't being used for debugging, the software still phones home and the IP is still being collected and logged when it otherwise wouldn't be. Either when uploading the report or when downloading the “collection configuration”.

Honestly, assuming full transparency, I'm not opposed to the concept. I question how much telemetry is actually necessary, but I'm certain there will be times when it's nice to have. It'd also be interesting to see how it would go when for once people can see exactly what is collected, when, and from where.

I'm not sure that Google is the best place to showcase such a concept though. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have no problem with handing more data over to Google, but Google has abused the public's good will for the sake of data collection many times, and it's sure to put off some of the people who aren't already completely disgusted by the idea of their favorite open source projects collecting telemetry.

> Any fully transparent data collection is going to have to include IP addresses and timestamps. Even if the IP isn't being used for debugging, the software still phones home and the IP is still being collected and logged when it otherwise wouldn't be. Either when uploading the report or when downloading the “collection configuration”.

How do you verifiably not collect users’ IP addresses when receiving data from them? The verifiable part is the problem, of course you can (and should) just not log the addresses, but then the users can only trust you (and hope you or your uplink haven’t received any legal orders to the contrary). The only approach I can think of would be a Tor hidden service, but while it would technically work, as far as not exposing your users to scrutiny it actually sounds worse.