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Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

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Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#311
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ethical choice is obvious. The distinction is between "What I do with my computer is none of your business unless I choose to make it your business" versus "What I do with my computer is your business unless I choose to not make it your business". It's insane that we are still having to justify privacy as a default, or that people continue to rationalize away the concerns. Yeah, maybe if it's opt-in they won't ha…

Any program is opt-in, so you just don't have to use it. Mayor bummer. Assuming data collection is properly disclosed, ofc, but i don't see anyone here arguing against that. The "there shouldn't be any" argument just seems so entitled with there being such demand / reasons to do so. I applaud everyone trying to find ways to satisfy both sides, as done by the original article.

You can't satisfy both sides by completely ignoring one side.

"What I do on my machine is none of your business, unless I decide it's your business" is a strong argument, presented multiple times in multiple places, and I haven't seen any rebuttal by any Go representative.

You can ignore the community and do whatever is good for business, but it's hypocritical to pretend you're a "community-driven" project if you do that.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cant solve this problem by carving out our eyes. We must adapt to having data about the world.

If folks were using just their eyes, they'd be calling users in to watch them interact with the software, calling users up to perform user surveys, doing all sorts of live-user testing. But, that costs money: folks don't generally like to do surveys for free, don't like to come to your site (or have you come to theirs) for free, don't like to participate in tests for free... and the caliber of person who can design a…

Except that those remote eyes don't look at what a person would look at. They know if a feature was used but they cannot see the frustration on the face of a user when some feature is missing or does not work as expected or is hard to find.

Re: Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

#314

> the vast majority of projects, even large ones that would benefit, stay away from telemetry. Nomad is one of these projects. We support a dizzying array of platforms (32bit Intel Linux?!). We have no idea how popular our Consul service mesh integration is. Are bug reports a sign of use or just failed experiments? Is anyone running on macOS in production or just ephemeral dev agents? Surveys about this are just aski…

Everything involves tradeoffs. The times "we" (previous companies) tried to implement telemetry in open source non-SaaS products (as distinct from "projects"), we either got huge blowback or users/customers simply blocked it at the firewall (and security teams at major enterprises were unwilling to open holes anyway). The only workable solution I found was integrating this in a value-add way, so that something in the…

> The only workable solution I found was integrating this in a value-add way, so that something in the service/experience/etc was better for the user/customer as a result of enabling telemetry, without the dark pattern of making things intentionally awful/worse without it.

This sounds like a great concept, but I'm struggling to come up with concrete examples - how did you approach it?

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