At first before reading the article I was very much against it. But after reading it, it seems a little bit more reasonable but I would really strongly prefer t

At first before reading the article I was very much against it. But after reading it, it seems a little bit more reasonable but I would really strongly prefer two things if this were to ever get implemented: 1) don't use Google. There must be services that will provide analytics pro-bono/really cheaply for open source/non-profits that aren't tied to a company with terrible privacy track records like Google. 2) make it abundantly clear that this will happen and explicitly give the opt-out instructions the first time (if it was indeed opt-out). As in, "We are enabling user tracking for better usage statistics. If you would like to opt-out, please type <...>." I know that I rarely read changelogs and that if things are not presented to me at installation time they would probably sneak in, through the fault of the Django team or not, but I'd worry that such a thing (notifying users directly) isn't easily possible through pip installations/setup.py. However, would it be very useful statistically compared to the Pypi installation numbers? Sure, Python is different than NPM because NPM almost always locally installs packages whereas Python installs globally by default, but the numbers must still be high as Django is likely one of the highest installed packages from Pypi and in Python-land in general and as czep points out, because they would only be tracking themselves, it would be hard to compare numbers to anything. It would be useful from a total amount perspective but it wouldn't have any use in comparing to other packages because the kind of data would be different: Django would have usage statistics whereas Pypi has installation/download statistics. I'm also surprised this is even necessary, since the main purpose of this is supposedly to be able to talk to potential investors for the DSF with concrete numbers. Is Django being basically familiar with every Python developer not enough? I'd really want to know specifically if investors have said they want usage data explicitly, rather than the nebulous idea that it may help make it easier to raise money before I'm more open to the proposal.