I'm a data guy, I'm all for data gathering when there is a business case, permission, disclosure, and strong PII protection. However this is just silly. GitLab,

I'm a data guy, I'm all for data gathering when there is a business case, permission, disclosure, and strong PII protection. However this is just silly. GitLab, on the doorstep of GitHub actions rolling out globally, shooting their leg off by forcing a 3rd party script into a business system. The thing that is utter shit is that they could really achieve any reasonable analytics needed from their server logs on their hosted systems. Pendo is the same as Heap analytics in that it logs EVERYTHING the user does, including things like scroll depth, time on page, form element selects, even clicks on non-clickable elements. You could just ask me how to make the UX better, GitLab; there is no need to do indiscriminate bulk collection. Or here's a novel idea: maybe actually give the users who choose to give you their behavior some kind of reward. A pro feature for free, some build runner priority, or even just a icon that glimmers with some gratitude. And an incognito switch for times when I don't want be seen. And a 3rd party? Its not that hard to put a pixel on a page and stand up an endpoint. What's to stop that 3rd party from injecting a keylogger and start harvesting secrets? Trust? If I were owning analytics at GitLab, I would: 1. Develop a way to get cleaned up server access logs in front of the UX team. This should get 85% of the work done. 2. Provide a 1st party controlled, open source client analytics tool that users can inspect. 3. Make it optional, off by default, and most importantly, fully accessible to the user. When its active it should provide a visual indication. Give opted in users a reward for participating. Give them the ability to see the data that has been gathered on them. Personally, I could find that log of my own activities quite useful if it were shared with me. 4. Prove the value of client side-tracking and share the wins with all stakeholders. Like, build a step in issue triage to gather metrics and share the results on the ticket to inform the decision making process. If the data doesn't does add double digit value to the company, kill the whole thing off. This was a brutal blunder for a company that's on Series E, and shows that leadership is not in touch with their customers. More actual face time with developers by leadership could have stopped this from happening.