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Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

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Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#231

Post by userbinator »

CJefferson wrote: post #194
codedokode wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is tracking user's actions the only way to improve software? That is not what one would expect from free and open source software project. If developers needs an information about how user uses a program, they should ask them to help.

this is going to sound insulting, but have you tried being an open-source developer? I've worked on products with tens of thousands of users, and the vast majority of those users never communicate. Worse (in my opinion), the users who communicate most tend to be experts, leading to programs tending to become better for expert users, and worse for beginners / occasional users -- see for example how many linux programs…

Worse (in my opinion), the users who communicate most tend to be experts, leading to programs tending to become better for expert users, and worse for beginners / occasional users

On the other hand, not listening to users but analytics leads to dumbed-down inflexible programs that can't get out of their own way for expert users.

If you have "tens of thousands of users" and most of them don't communicate, I'd call that successful. They're satisfied.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#232

Post by Nursie »

arjie wrote: post #146
froh42 wrote: post #38

As I didn't update brew for a long time I did not have the analytics version. So I upgraded to see what happens. In fact it did NOT prompt me when enabling analytics, but it did display a notice (hidden in several hundred lines of output during brew upgrade): ------------------- + 5a9e19f...7f13b37 master -> origin/master (forced update) * [new tag] 0.1 -> 0.1 HEAD is now at 7f13b37 Merge pull request #1562 from wood…

> Looking at the website one of homebrew's developers (or at least the website developers) is based over here in Europe. He might be a nice target if you want to raise a stink and litigate. Incredibly shameful comment. Calling for someone to be sued, and then especially targeting someone who'd be vulnerable. Fucking unbelievable. Flagged this hard. Man, it would be great if analytics couldn't be opted out of and you…

It may well be problematic under data protection laws in the EU.

Suing straight off the bat is bad, but if they refuse to so anything about it may be the only option.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#233

Post by hyperbovine »

pvinis wrote: post #136
blub wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US approach to privacy is "let the market sort it out". It has sorted it out by transforming the internet into a giant spying machine sucking up contacts, photos, documents, videos, metadata, what packages you use, when where and how you exercise, everything The EU approach to privacy (eroded by lobbying and lack of control over US companies) is that citizens have a right over their information. They can ask what…

Do you use brew? Have you contributed code to it? Have you installed something using brew, before updating brew for a while? For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case. I call that progress, no matter how sm…

Come now, a bajillion other software projects have "figured out" that people forget to update everything, always, without resorting to this sort of behavior. There's even a whole library, Sparkle, the exists just to solve this problem. Your nonexample of the necessity of analytics merely serves to reinforce the point you are trying to rebut.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#234

Post by Nursie »

jakebasile wrote: post #120

This really doesn't concern me at all. I don't feel I am harmed by Google possibly knowing what software I install, because if anyone wants to look I keep the script that installs it in my public dotfile repo on GitHub. Can anyone explain to me how this could be used against someone? I'm asking completely seriously as I don't see any harm in this no matter how hard I try. Edit: I do agree that the notice should be mo…

Oh hey, you're using foomaker version 1.6? I picked up a great exploit for that earlier!

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#235

Post by missblit »

beagle3 wrote: post #113
rkachowski wrote: post #35

This is google analytics. It's a bit different than google directly taking the data and using it for google purposes (e.g. streetview cars gathering SSID information for location pinpointing). The data (afaik) is used only by the homebrew team instead of Google. A more accurate summary would be "Brew is sending usage data to a google owned analytics service".

if google didn't correlate analytics data from multiple sources, it would be about as informative as a local piwik install, which is to say "not much". Perhaps they don't "use" it directly, but surely they use it to improve their statistical profile of the specific users? Does anyone know if the GA cookie sent by brew is same or correlated with the one in the browser?

From the source code it looks like brew uses a UUID generated locally (e.g. from a source like /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid). I don't see how it could be correlated with anything in the browser.

In terms of the analytics URL they set the client-ID, which indicates a "particular instance of an application install": https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#236

Post by hueving »

pvinis wrote: post #19

Yes we know. brew tells you that. And you can disable it. Data is being sent to Google everytime you do almost anything in almost all websites, using the same technology. So what? Some of the times it's to make the product better, or better targeted. Some other times it's just for spying on the users. Let's stop complaining about stuff that someone does and tell you they do it. There are many more that do the same th…

>Yes we know. brew tells you that. And you can disable it.

No, we don't know. This article wouldn't have hit the front page if it wasn't subtle and user-hostile by default (opt-out).

>Data is being sent to Google everytime you do almost anything in almost all websites, using the same technology. So what?

Brew is not a website, it's a CLI tool. People expect this behavior of websites, not of sysadmin tools. How would you feel if you found out your compiler shipped off a copy of your code to a remote server each time you encountered a compiler error "to improve the compiler" and you had to opt out of this behavior?

>Some of the times it's to make the product better, or better targeted. Some other times it's just for spying on the users.

It's always spying, regardless of the motivation.

>How do we expect open source to become better if everyone is being a crybaby because brew got a history of how often they do brew update?

Somehow open source has functioned all of these years without silently harvesting users' usage data. I don't know how new you are to open source, but this is definitely not the way you do QA for an open source project.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#238

Post by stan_rogers »

CJefferson wrote: post #175
hueving wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please make it opt in. If you truly believe people closely read the prompts for having their data harvested, a default to "No" should not impact you at all. If you don't believe they read the prompts closely, you're an asshole for stealing data by default.

Is it "stealing data" to record that certain options in my program are never used, or used frequently, or whenever a user clicks on options A,B and C in sequence the app crashes? My problem is that I believe that 90% of the users of my app won't care one way or the other if I record these stats. If I default opt-out these people, then I lose all that useful data and in the process, I believe, make my app worse for ev…

You should, perhaps, question your beliefs. When I get "do you want to send...", I only very rarely click "yes/OK", and then only if that and the OS were the only things running and the problem is locally reproducible. The state of my machine is none of your damned business.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#239

Post by hueving »

pvinis wrote: post #186
blub wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can complain just fine about whichever software we want, don't try to make up rules and come to us with fake outrage about even greater injustices. This is a classical attempt to muddy the waters.

Ok, sure. At least complain for both. I didn't see the post referring to anything besides brew. I'm all for protesting and trying to fix any size and kind of injustice. But just don't target the less guilty. brew is still guilty for not having an even bigger announcement. But less target others too, at least. I would hate to see brew or any other similar software be the sole target and have to change for the worse, b…

>I didn't see the post referring to anything besides brew.

That's because this post is about brew. Windows 10 got tons of flak when it pulled this crap as well. "There are worse cases" is not an excuse for a project doing something shitty.

Re: Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

#240

Post by hueving »

CJefferson wrote: post #194
codedokode wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is tracking user's actions the only way to improve software? That is not what one would expect from free and open source software project. If developers needs an information about how user uses a program, they should ask them to help.

this is going to sound insulting, but have you tried being an open-source developer? I've worked on products with tens of thousands of users, and the vast majority of those users never communicate. Worse (in my opinion), the users who communicate most tend to be experts, leading to programs tending to become better for expert users, and worse for beginners / occasional users -- see for example how many linux programs…

>I've worked on products with tens of thousands of users, and the vast majority of those users never communicate.

And your answer to that is to spy on them unless they read fine-grained details that even the generally expert users on this site missed?

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