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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#51

Post by Forgeties79 »

salomonk_mur wrote: post #30
Forgeties79 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where (surprise surprise) I respect Valve. The hardware survey is opt in and transparent. They get useful info out of it and it’s just..not scummy. There are all sorts of best practices for getting info without vacuuming up everyone’s data in opaque ways.

They are analyzing absolutely every click you make, I can guarantee it.

And if you provide evidence of this (and yes I think it is possible) then I will say it’s bad.

The hardware survey is not that.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#52

Post by Forgeties79 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #22
Forgeties79 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where (surprise surprise) I respect Valve. The hardware survey is opt in and transparent. They get useful info out of it and it’s just..not scummy. There are all sorts of best practices for getting info without vacuuming up everyone’s data in opaque ways.

To be fair, you can be pretty sure they're heavily leveraging all their store data, in loads of ways. They probably sit on the biggest dataset of video game preferences for people in general, and I'm betting they make use of it heavily.

If you have details on what they’re collecting and how they’re using it/if they’re selling it to advertisers/etc, I’m happy to make a judgment.

I’m not saying they don’t engage in any of those practices, I am specifically talking about the hardware survey.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#53

Post by redsocksfan45 »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

[dead]

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#55

Post by wongarsu »

dale_glass wrote: post #48
a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has…

A more intuitive git UI would reduce engagement. Do you really want to cut a 30 minute git session down to five minutes by introducing things like 'git restore' or 'git undo'? /s

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#56

Post by ryanmcbride »

hansmayer wrote: post #44
a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users Unfortunately this is due to a large part of "decision makers" being non-technical folks, not being able to understand how the tools is actually used, as they don't use such tools themselves. So some product manager "responsible" for development tooling needs this sort of stuff to be able to perform in their job, just as some clu…

Man if I had a nickle for every time a PM asked me to violate user privacy for the purposes of making a slide that will be shown to their boss for 2.5 seconds I'd probably make enough to actually retire someday.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#57

Post by TheDong »

gordonhart wrote: post #46
a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

The impact of a few more network calls and decreased privacy is basically never felt by users beyond this abstract "they're spying on me" realization. The impact of this telemetry for a product development team is material. Not saying that telemetry more valuable than privacy, just that it's a straightforward decision for a company to make when real benefits are only counterbalanced by abstract privacy concerns. This…

For most CLIs, I definitely feel extra network calls because they translate to real latency for commands that _should_ be quick.

If I run "gh alias set foo bar", and that takes even a marginally perceptible amount of time, I'll feel like the tool I'm using is poorly built since a local alias obviously doesn't need network calls.

I do see that `gh` is spawning a child to do sending in the background (https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/3ad29588b8bf9f2390be652f46ee...), which also is something I'd be annoyed at since having background processes lingering in a shell's session is bad manners for a command that doesn't have a very good reason to do so.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#58

Post by reaperducer »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?

Because they're too shy, lazy, or socially awkward to actually ask their users questions.

They cover up this anxiety and laziness by saying that it costs too much, or it doesn't "scale." Both of these are false.

My company requires me to actually speak to the people who use the web sites I build; usually about every ten to twelve months. The company pays for my time, travel, and other expenses.

The company does this because it cares about the product. It has to, because it is beholden to the customers for its financial position, not to anonymous stock market trading bots a continent away.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#59

Post by wongarsu »

a2128 wrote: post #42
j_maffe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction? I'm not sure if you're implying it's obvious but it's not obvious to me that it would be unhelpful.

Just anecdotally, I get the feeling telemetry often does more harm than good, because it's too easy to misinterpret or lie with statistics. There needs to be proper statistical methodology and biases need to be considered, but this doesn't always happen. Maybe a contrived example, but someone wants to show high impact on their next performance review? Implement the new feature in such a way that everyone easily miscl…

Not to mention it's really hard to statistically tell the difference between people spending a lot of time with a feature because it's really useful or because it's really difficult to get to do what you want

Telemetry is a really poor substitute for actually observing a couple of your users. But it's cheap and feels scientific and inclusive/fair (after all you are looking at everyone)

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#60

Post by embedding-shape »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #52
embedding-shape wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you can be pretty sure they're heavily leveraging all their store data, in loads of ways. They probably sit on the biggest dataset of video game preferences for people in general, and I'm betting they make use of it heavily.

If you have details on what they’re collecting and how they’re using it/if they’re selling it to advertisers/etc, I’m happy to make a judgment. I’m not saying they don’t engage in any of those practices, I am specifically talking about the hardware survey.

> If you have details on what they’re collecting

Well, you can start with everything a typical HTTP request and TCP connection comes with, surely they're already storing those things for "anti-fraud practices", wouldn't be far to imagine this data warehouse is used for analytics and product decisions as well.

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