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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#12

Post by NeckBeardPrince »

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)

> gh config set telemetry false > ! warning: 'telemetry' is not a known configuration key

What's strange is if you check your `~/.config/gh/config.yml` it will put `telemetry: disabled` in there. But it will put anything in that `config.yml` lol.

> gh config set this-is-some-random-bullshit aww-shucks > ! warning: 'this-is-some-random-bullshit' is not a known configuration key

But in my config.yml is

this-is-some-random-bullshit: aww-shucks

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#14

Post by a2128 » 

    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 over who exactly is using which features and commands. Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#16

Post by embedding-shape »

sammy2255 wrote: post #13

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

Before GitHub had a CLI, I used cURL (via zsh alises/functions) to open PRs and find what remote/branch a PR is associated with.

Today I use a Golang CLI made with ~200K LOC to do essentially the same thing. Yay, efficiency?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#17

Post by embedding-shape »

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…

> Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices?

It's not that it's insufficient, new developers, product people and designers literally don't know how to make tasteful and useful decisions without first "asking users" by experimenting on them.

Used to be you built up an intuition for your user base, but considering everyone is changing jobs every year, I guess people don't have time for that anymore, so literally every decision is "data driven" and no user is super happy or not anymore, everyone is just "OK, that's fine".

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#18

Post by j_maffe »

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, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

I'm not sure if you're implying it's obvious but it's not obvious to me that it would be unhelpful.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#19

Post by Forgeties79 »

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.

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