Honestly, I think they should go with opt-in and make it clear to the community that the public dataset will be the sole source of decision making for future deprecations. If you want your favorite pet feature still enabled and no one using it is sending them telemetry then too bad.
Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#32I think that the author has kind of a Stockholm syndrome. "Users are liars, so let's spy them directly to know what we want to know". It is mind blowing how, as an user/the target, you can support that. Nothing is really anonymous and your anonymous data can say a lot about you. Telemetry coming from this IP, so company x is using go. A pattern of data coming every 2 days, so their build nodes rebuild every 2 days. T…
I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it. Is this the common attitude inside Google or Silicon Valley proper these days?
Privacy used to be kind of sacrosanct in the industry. What happened?
I guess when surveillance driven advertising pays all the bills it has an extreme warping effect on everyone’s mentality. It’s hard to care about privacy when violating it is how you get paid.
I’m increasingly wondering if we might vastly improve our society by banning or taxing the hell out of all advertising. It’s an industry that makes the world a worse place in deep and pervasive ways that go much further than just making everything ugly and obnoxious. The industry pushes a toxic relationship between people and businesses at every level.
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#33Google: "we don't want to talk to people, or hear their opinions, so we'll add telemetry to make decisions we want without including anyone else!"
Also Google: removed "do no evil" so they could... Do evil... Without sounding like hypocrites.
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#34Mozilla shows time and time again that decisions based on opt-out telemetry are worse than decisions taken without telemetry at all.
"Telemetry shows people aren't using this (privacy / internet freedom related) feature, so we can just remove it"
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#35As someone who was considering getting some Go and Rust under his belt, they've saved me a lot of time. This whole telemetry nonsense has ensured I won't waste my time investing it in Go. Great job.
Uh, what? The Go team introduced an idea, opt out telemetry with a one week delay before it was sent. Users said it wasn’t great, overwhelmingly. The Go team heard the feedback and made it opt in. What’s the problem, that’s a good thing.
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#36Reminded of a post I saw the other day referencing Clausewitz to say "if your ideal military strategy is politically unachievable, it's not the ideal strategy". If going for opt-out telemetry makes your customers hate you and you're forced to retreat under a hail of fire, going opt-in is not a mistake. There's also a philosophical problem in going too deep into "customers don't know what they want" and A/B testing ev…
Ah, are you also a Bret Devereux reader?
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#37To be honest, the fact that Google is behind Go, is whats holding me back from getting into it. Same with React and FB. I dont really have any sympathy points left for them.
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would data be useless?
I'd say there are times when bad data is worse than no data. Consider that the farther away you get from it, the parties involved are either unaware or unwilling to treat it as bad data, so they make make harmful decisions.
And opt-out or even mandatory data is without doubt quite bad to start with. And the interpretation of the data is rarely flawless or even pretends to be objective.
So if someone says that opt-in data is useless, I'd say that out-out data is just as useless.
And then we have to pretend that implementation, collection and analysis and then further actions would make it worthwhile.
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#39Respecting the users wishes isn’t a mistake. For sure it may have a few digits less of accuracy in some dashboards but who cares. The consensus was that opt-in was the best solution, and thankfully Google went with the best solution.
While I agree that going with what the users want is the correct approach, but "a few digits less of accuracy" really undersells how much the data quality will suffer.
It will pretty much become useless (how many people are going to opt-in, realistically?) - and that's fine if it's what the community wants.
Re: Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake
#40For me every kind of telemetry, data harvesting and so on should be opt-in.