GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#361

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

lamasery wrote: post #191

embedding-shape wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware. Well, I was mainly talking about network requests, which are quite literally served by "my hardware" when your client reaches out to my servers, and they agree to serve your client. I do agree that it sucks that browser viewports now also are considered "mine" from t…

Yeah server logs don’t bother me. I’m requesting a resource, you unavoidably see that happen. The attitude that’s changed is that in the 90s and 00s a program that sent information about what you’re doing that wasn’t necessary and expected for how it operates would have been instantly, popularly, and unequivocally labeled spyware by a programmer crowd. Now it’s normal and you get a bunch of folks claiming it’s ok.

Worse, you get a bunch of programmers claiming it's impossible to write software without that level of spying.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#362

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:23 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #236

almostjazz wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could survey a representative sample

Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever. This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.

If people feel like their feedback is valued you don't even need to ask them for it, they will come to you.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#363

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #278

codedokode wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can hire people to test your product and provide analytics. But not try to siphon the data for free.

I'm not taking a side on whether a product should add telemetry. I'm rejecting the absurd notion that these suggestions are at all giving the same information.

No one claimed that they give the same information, only that it's viable to produce a good product that solves your user's needs without using telemetry. The whole point is that you don't get the same information, e.g. no private data that the users haven't provided informed consent for upload to your servers.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#364

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

SchemaLoad wrote: post #305

embedding-shape wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and…

What people say, and what people do are different things. Especially when the people who agree to talk to you aren't representative of the whole user base.

And what people do and the reasons they do it are even more different.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#365

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #101

nkrisc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking. And the difference between what they do and what they want is equally shocking. If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data. Quantitative data doesn’t tell you what your users want or care about. It tells you only what they are doing. You can get s…

> If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data. Excellent point. > but if it’s not entirely opt-in, I think it is effectively spying no matter what you’re collecting, varying only along a dimension of invasiveness. Every web page visit is logged on the http server, and that's been the default since the mid 1990's. Is that spying?

No, since GDPR logging for page views is not something you can do without thinking what metadata you store with it and for how long.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#366

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

7bit wrote: post #222

jubilanti wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points. And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure. It…

Get off your high horse. Talking to users when you have hundreds of customers does no more than give you an idea of what those specific people need. If you have hundreds of users or more, then data is the only thing that reliably tells you these things.

Clearly the data doesn't tell you that. Either that or most companies gobbling up ungodly amounts of private data don't actually cares what it tells them about the user's needs.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#367

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

lynndotpy wrote: post #256

Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

Game developers benefit tremendously from streams where they get to see peoples webcams _and_ screens as they use their software. This would be _absolutely insane_ telemetry to request from a user for any other piece of software, but it would be fantastically useful in identifying where people get frustrated and why. That said, I do not trust Microsoft with any telemetry, I am not invested in helping them improve the…

You can get this level of observation by paying testers (both professions as well as existing users who provide informed consent). You don't get to just spy on random users, yes.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#368

Post by halapro » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #280

halapro wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never has written about If you don't want to look at what people write you can't say that they haven't written about it. > the supposed failure of design I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations. If you want to read about complaints, you really don't have to look further than the myriad of git GUIs, TUIs and otherwise alternative/simplified inte…

> I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations. The complexity is only there when you want to avoid learning what you’re doing. Just like find(1) is complex if you don’t know stuff about the file system or sed(1) is complex if you don’t know regex and line based addresing of a text file. A lot of people who are using git don’t want to know what a comm…

Really? What does checkout and fast-forward means? This is why people don't like git. Basic operations that have arcane naming.