5 ms·

Where's your reasoning? Homebrew gave theirs. Keep in mind that no personal info is ever sent. Just a random UUID.

• oconnore 11y ago
  > no personal info > Just your universally unique id ...
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    "oconnore" is a perfectly valid unique identifier on HackerNews that doesn't tie to anything about you if you don't have your email address in your profile. This is no different.
    • ecesena 11y ago
      he does have the email, though
    • LeoPanthera 11y ago
      The difference is, it's a choice to post on a public website. homebrew is a package management tool, there is no expectation that it will send information about you to Google.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • yborg 11y ago
        >is a package management tool This. The reasons they articulate for suddenly deciding on performing this data collection, and for doing it via GA are laughable. I am sufficiently annoyed at this because of the generation of yet another outbound data stream from my system, but the fact that in all likelihood the project will do nothing with this data really annoys me. There is zero need for this in a package system.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • estel 11y ago
    > > Just your universally unique id How is a Homebrew UUID personal info?
    • notalaser 11y ago
      It's on my PC.
    • Touche 11y ago
      They send more than that, have you checked out the code? Every time you do an install Google gets to know about it: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/acc9a7ca8554bc2413dee2d6d0f407b3a59c628c/Library/Homebrew/formula_installer.rb#L207 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/acc9a7ca8554bc2413dee2... Maybe this is sufficiently private, maybe not. I'm not a security expert. Maybe GA's fingerprinting heuristics are advanced enough to know that because user 1034324234 installed spacemacs at 4:01 and I visited the spacemacs documentation at 4:01 that there's a decent chance I'm user 1034324234. Decent enough to see if the pattern happens again. After a few rounds of this, it's close enough to serve me ads based on user 1034324234's install patterns. :shrug: doesn't sound crazy to me.
      • throwanem 11y ago
        Ads which you'll no doubt block anyway. Not seeing the issue here.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
• geoelectric 11y ago
  One decent reason would be that existing installs arguably shouldn't change their privacy considerations without a hoop to jump through.
• LeoPanthera 11y ago
  My reasoning? Because it's good to respect the privacy and choices of your users. Homebrew never called home to Google in the past, most people would not reasonably expect it to suddenly start doing so without letting them know.
  • davb 11y ago
    Agreed. I expect that if it was opt-in most people wouldn't take the active step to do so. And if given a choice on first-run, a large proportion of users would choose to disable the analytics reporting. Making it opt-out seems deceitful - an attempt to trick users into leaving it enabled. And the Homebrew developer responses thus far on the GitHub issue (users should be watching the documentation and Twitter feed - they'd have seen the announcement) seem unrealistic and unfair. This should have been opt-in from day one, not opt-out. Especially if it's changing existing behaviour (having never automatically reported telemetry in the past).
• isomorphic 11y ago
  I block Google Analytics in my web browser, too...