I'm glad they reversed course and apologized but it still amazes me how powerful the reality distortion bubble can be even at well-meaning corporations. It's as if there was a meeting at the Red Cross where somebody said "Hey why don't we start selling guns? It would be a great fundraising tool." And everybody in the room just nodded and said "Yeah that's a pretty great idea. Let's start tomorrow!"
Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
161–170 of 285 posts
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#162The reaction to this whole saga has been insane. Chill out people. They fucked up, users gave feedback, they listened. This isn't some corporate conspiracy, some grand ethical dilemma with an evil company on one side and some white knight hackers on the other. Let's imagine for a second that they are people trying to do the right thing, with years of history doing the best they can. They wanted to measure usage to ma…
If there hadn't been an outcry gitlab wouldn't have changed their trajectory. Seems like it worked.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their CFO showed that he has little regard for the privacy of their users. I highly doubt that has changed. Many devs and compliance folk were on the right side of this in the MR and feature threads, but they were overruled. I highly doubt the CFO has changed his viewpoint, and he's still in power over there. They only backtracked after the "insane" reaction. They anticipated some amount of pushback, but obviously ho…
Privacy? Their users are companies building software. The CFO is right -- they can agree or disagree to the terms of use and choose whether or not to use the new software.
The issue is that it they changed the agreement suddenly, and held user's data hostage until they "agreed".
I don't know why you think that's ethically ok to hold user data hostage until they agree to give up more rights. It's borderline ransom.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, if the outcry continued even after their rollback & apology, _then_ it would be unwarranted. But everyone's happy now (well, arguably GitLab may not be, but they should surely be able to work out a solution with the community on how to collect telemetrics in a privacy-conscious way). I'm also glad the feedback was so strong, as the ad-tech industry has spent the past 15 years numbing the general populace to unw…
> Yeah, if the outcry continued even after their rollback & apology, _then_ it would be unwarranted. The outcry may stop but the trust is now gone and will take years to rebuild. Next time I'm considering/recommending on-premise git hosting I won't be recommending gitlab. I'm also considering moving my personal repos that I pay for. Generally I only interact through the CLI and don't think about the web interface muc…
While I haven't used it myself, I think gravitar is an avatar that gravitates toward you, as implemented by you putting an image on their server, and countless other websites include it from that server when an identifier (probably email address) match exists between the two accounts. So in other words, gravitar knows a bit about your usage of countless websites that each volunteered your usage pattern to it. Since evidently you are seeing a connection between your machine and gravatar, they get page-load granularity. If this description is incorrect, which it very well might be since I know nothing about the service beyond what I inferred by its name, please do correct me.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#165I find the anti-telemetry attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them. Of course you should have the right to have that…
> I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right?
They know what products are selling. They don't necessarily know what I personally am buying.
The point of those loyalty program cards is to associate purchasing habits with repeat customers. Those cards, you may note, are opt-in. To belabor the analogy, this was the equivalent of my grocery store putting cameras all over the building and offering me a mask if I wanted to opt out of the user monitoring program.
"Everyone else is doing it" is a pretty bad reason when many of your clients chose to do business with you at least in part because you are not doing it.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#166This is incredibly dumb. Both Pendo and Snowplow are analytics providers, meaning they both have in their TOS that the company remains the owner of the data in question and that the services only exist to facilitate analysis of the data in question.
Effectively this is users complaining that Gitlab wants to simplify their data analysis overhead. Presumably nothing precludes them from sending the exact same data to these companies and more on the backend. What do users expect? For Gitlab to build every single part of their stack in-house (CRM, analytics, support tooling, etc)? Because that's what this is effectively asking for.
What's next? Protesting that a company uses RDS instead of their own hand-rolled Postgres setup? Because this is the same level of stupid.
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was done. There even was those small banners that said something in the way of "if you have gmail I won't mail you" etc. Thing is, the broader public don't care. The difference between gitlab and gmail is primarily that developers care more about this stuff and value their code more than most people care about their email. They are also much more informed in the matter, most using gmail haven't got a clue.
There's a difference between gitlab and gmail. People pay for gitlab while gmail is free. Google can easily declare "either you take it for what it is, or leave." Gitlab can't.
Gitlab has a fairly powerful "free" (as 'gratis') service-plan.
https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...
Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#168This is incredibly dumb. Both Pendo and Snowplow are analytics providers, meaning they both have in their TOS that the company remains the owner of the data in question and that the services only exist to facilitate analysis of the data in question. Effectively this is users complaining that Gitlab wants to simplify their data analysis overhead. Presumably nothing precludes them from sending the exact same data to th…
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Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#169This is just the beginning, at some point, they will flip. Google was our darling, that could do no wrong. Just imagine, to be bold and say "Don't be evil!" And then, what happened? This is just a short term reaction to quiet down the noise, but their long term hand has been exposed. They are not going to do it, but note that nothing says they won't try to or do it again in the far future. What I really will like to…
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Re: Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com
#170I find the anti-telemetry attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them. Of course you should have the right to have that…
> I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? They know what products are selling. They don't necessarily know what I personally am buying. The point of those loyalty program cards is to associate purchasing habits with repeat customers. Those cards, you may note, are opt-in. To belabor the analogy, this was the equivalent of my grocery store putting cameras all over t…
> They know what products are selling. They don't necessarily know what I personally am buying.
The vast majority of people use credit cards, which would allow them to track you. If you want to be more anonymous, you can use cash, just like you could install a blocker extension if you want to be more anonymous in the browser.
> To belabor the analogy, this was the equivalent of my grocery store putting cameras all over the building and offering me a mask if I wanted to opt out of the user monitoring program.
Indeed, my local grocery store added cameras all over recently, and apparently many of them use bluetooth trackers. I don't even think they offer masks, though I've never asked.
> "Everyone else is doing it" is a pretty bad reason when many of your clients chose to do business with you at least in part because you are not doing it.
Did gitlab pitch themselves as a privacy-centric git host? I thought their main selling point used to be that they had unlimited private repos. I could be wrong though, I haven't followed them much.