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I admire the patience of the Netdata developers. When you develop opensource software you unfortunately have to put up with such drama. Is this telemetry reall

by aritmo 7y ago

I admire the patience of the Netdata developers. When you develop opensource software you unfortunately have to put up with such drama. Is this telemetry really "spyware"? Or, is it just an attempt to insinuate that there is malware embedded somehow in the source, just to cause trouble to the project.

sneak 7y ago
Software that transmits information about its user (including their PII[1]) by misusing that user's computer hardware and resources without that user's consent and against their wishes is malware: specifically it is spyware. Netdata goes a step further and does it silently, without even notifying the user that it is spying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware People don't like their common, popular software being called that because it's truly not a good thing, not because their software isn't spyware (as you can see at the above link). It's become somewhat popular amongst unethical developers to pretend that this sort of collection without consent is somehow okay or necessary to their ends as long as the users don't see it happening; this belief is not shared or widely held by users. Indeed, when exposed to users, it generates huge distrust of the manufacturer, and sometimes makers of software will backpedal, such as GitHub's Atom now offering[2] a consent dialog on startup[3] for user spying. [1]: An IP address + timestamp, in practice, usually uniquely identifies a person, and is thus personally identifying information in reality, regardless of whether or not the GDPR classes it as PII for purposes of regulation or not. [2]: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 [3]: it's still nonfunctional, sadly: https://github.com/atom/telemetry/issues/33 https://github.com/atom/telemetry/issues/33

by aritmo 7y ago

sneak 7y ago

Software that transmits information about its user (including their PII[1]) by misusing that user's computer hardware and resources without that user's consent and against their wishes is malware: specifically it is spyware. Netdata goes a step further and does it silently, without even notifying the user that it is spying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware People don't like their common, popular software being called that because it's truly not a good thing, not because their software isn't spyware (as you can see at the above link). It's become somewhat popular amongst unethical developers to pretend that this sort of collection without consent is somehow okay or necessary to their ends as long as the users don't see it happening; this belief is not shared or widely held by users. Indeed, when exposed to users, it generates huge distrust of the manufacturer, and sometimes makers of software will backpedal, such as GitHub's Atom now offering[2] a consent dialog on startup[3] for user spying. [1]: An IP address + timestamp, in practice, usually uniquely identifies a person, and is thus personally identifying information in reality, regardless of whether or not the GDPR classes it as PII for purposes of regulation or not. [2]: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966 [3]: it's still nonfunctional, sadly: https://github.com/atom/telemetry/issues/33 https://github.com/atom/telemetry/issues/33