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> This leaves the last row—"data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)." While that's certainly a broad category and not

• colejohnson66 5y ago
  It’s standard legal boilerplate to say “if we do get a request in the form of a warrant, we will follow the law and comply.” Despite the common reading, it does not mean “we collect data we can hand over to law enforcement.”
  • jolmg 5y ago
    > it does not mean “we collect data we can hand over to law enforcement.” That's exactly what it says. The part of the privacy policy in discussion is about what they collect, not what they do with data they collect for other reasons. That's very different from the standard boilerplate, specially for a locally running program.
  • SahAssar 5y ago
    A local application does not need that boilerplate, right? If the app does not have a server-side component why put it in there?
    • duped 5y ago
      Because they're collecting telemetry remotely
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Just because it has access to your whole machine doesn't mean it's going to convert into spyware and start keylogging you. It's open-source, you can audit what it's capable of. It sends very specific telemetry data home, and I think that's what this document covers. It's an unfortunate catch-22 really. The best way to improve your program's performance is to collect telemetry, but that opens the door to law enforcement asking for the telemetry data, and you also need (IANAL) to provide a scary privacy policy like this.
  • Meph504 5y ago
    If this data has value, and you are requiring your users to provide it, that makes your software transactional in its nature, and not FOSS. If the data you are collecting is useful to law enforcement, for prosecuting an individual, you aren't anonymizing it enough. The simple response to any law enforcement request should be simple, "We have no way of providing you with data identifiable to an individual." FOSS has existed for decades without telemetry, it isn't needed to make good software, the convenience of it shouldn't come at the risk to your users, and should not represent a commercial benefit that is required from them to provide to you for use of your product. It's simple, and the rest of these justifications is noise.
  • mousepilot 5y ago
    You really need some skills to comprehensively track down all the telemetry and successfully remove it. I'm happy folks are out there intending to do this, but its also going to provide for multiple forks probably, and now you have to trust them also. Its just a stupid move that rightly gives the "muse" guys a PR stink.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jolmg 5y ago
    > Just because it has access to your whole machine doesn't mean it's going to convert into spyware and start keylogging you. Never said it meant that. The problem is not with the existence of locally-run programs. The problem is with outright saying (in the second row, first column of the table in the privacy policy) that they'll collect whatever they feel necessary for whatever requests come in. As an example of how the privacy policy is worded, if a request comes in to know everything you typed between datetime A and datetime B, they would have to keylog in order to obtain the "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests". The reasonable, standard way to comply with the law would be to instead take the content of column 2 and 3 of row 2 and put them in column 2 and 3 of row 1, and delete column 1 of row 2. IOW, you collect data for the reasonable operation of your business, and you provide access to that data to authorities when given a warrant. You don't just say you'll collect whatever is requested of you. > It sends very specific telemetry data home, and I think that's what this document covers. No, that's part of what the document covers. Specifically, it's what the first row of the table in the privacy policy covers. But the problem is not the first row; it's the second.