10 ms·

Probably related to[0]. To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, b

Probably related to[0]. To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. They don't disable it when prompted, nor would they enable it manually. The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. For this you need a good and balanced sample of your users. You don't really get any kind of sensible sample if you only do it opt-in. Additionally, this ship has long sailed, everybody does opt-out. What I do think however, is that it should very clearly notify the user of this, and give them an easy way to disable it. Like in OctoSQL[1] (disclaimer: which I'm the author of) which prompts you on first run and shows explicitly how to disable it. All things considered, this is an open source project, so you're free to maintain a fork without telemetry. The Go toolchain also uses the Google-hosted module proxy by default, which really is a bit like telemetry already. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707583 [1]: https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. It does sort of hinge on the highly suspect assumption that usefulness is correlated with use. An obvious counter-example to this is something like a fire-extinguisher, which will in the ideal case just sit on a wall until it's use-by date passes and then it's discarded having never been used; or on the flip side, an incredibly byzantine workflow that could be reduced to something much simpler will appear important and useful. Even without these edge cases, interpreting statistics is really hard. Like people with PhDs who have studied these things for years still get them wrong all the time. What ends up happening more often than not is it's used as a tool to quiet the critics when pushing through unpopular changes.
- cube2222 4y ago
  All this boils down to "an unskilled engineer will misinterpret data even if they have it". I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. There's a lot of very simple questions you can answer very reliably, too, like "what proportion of the users are still using a certain compatibility flag".
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    My point is that scientists whose job is to interpret data and construct experiments gets this wrong on a regular basis, despite years of training in constructing experiments and interpreting data, despite peer review, despite staking their career and reputation on not making these kinds of mistakes. They still happen! A lot! Interpreting data is very hard.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. Funny, I’d assume the exact opposite. After all much of the understanding of privacy and statistics at scale was developed after 1980.
    - philosopher1234 4y ago
      Normally Hacker News is ruthless with stupid comments like this, but some sort of unexamined feelings of inadequacy make Go devs a fair target. I hate this attitude.
  - remram 4y ago
    Go is actually well known for dubious choices they reverted later, like not using libc, their weird major version scheme, or the absence of generics. There's a good record of charging ahead against the popular wisdom and being proven wrong.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Most software features are not like fire extinguishers. More than that, the interesting stats may be not even around user-visible features, but around internal mechanisms, like some cache hit rate, or how often is some branch in the compiler invoked. As long as stats are clearly inspectable, reasonably anonymized, and are opt-out, I'd be fine with sending them.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    The features that are like fire extinguishers are the ones most likely to be unjustly removed with the rationale of looking at telemetry. See for example Mozilla's bizarre decision to remove the ability to change the override the character encoding of a webpage with some half-baked detector.
    - philosopher1234 4y ago
      We cant solve this problem by carving out our eyes. We must adapt to having data about the world.
      - stonogo 4y ago
        Nobody wants you to carve out your eyes. They want you to stop shoving eyes into everything you touch. Meanwhile, I'll decide what I must or must not adapt to, thank you.
        philosopher1234 4y ago
        Read more carefully
        stonogo 4y ago
        Write more clearly
        philosopher1234 4y ago
saurik 4y ago
The argument for this being opt-in isn't about "it works better", it is about it being ethically correct. There are a ton of things that "don't work" unless you do something unethical: that doesn't mean they are OK, it doesn't mean they should be tolerated, and it doesn't mean the people who do them--and, at the end of the day, it is people who make these decisions: there is a human being who refused to say "no" and whose name we might even be able to find out--shouldn't be judged by their peers for doing these things... and that is all true even if it is (currently) legal for them to do it!!
- cube2222 4y ago
  You're framing this as though the "ethical" choice were obvious, or that there was a person who "knew this was the ethical thing to do, but turned a blind eye". I disagree, I think it's a very contested topic, with lots of discussion whenever it's raised here, with either side possibly being a vocal minority.
  - atahanacar 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - philosopher1234 4y ago
      This is a very extreme position. It's hard to take you seriously when your comment doesn't have any nuance.
      - atahanacar 4y ago
        Finding the collection of a person's data without consent unethical is not an "extreme position". Since when "consent" or more correctly "autonomy of individual" is called "extreme"? If you did the same thing in my field (medicine), you would lose your license.
        philosopher1234 4y ago
Terretta 4y ago
> What I do think however, is that it should very clearly notify the user of this, and give them an easy way to disable it. You make a good point. As a for instance from a popular Mac-based package manager that (unexpectedly for many) defaults to telemetry from your CLI: `brew analytics off` is not hard to type after installing homebrew, but the installation text doesn't mention that; instead it points to a web page you have to read about how wonderful the analytics are before eventually finding the incantation: https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics I wonder how many people care enough to click that link, read all the "analytics are actually good for you" copy, and then change their mind to leave it on. I'm guessing almost zero? But perhaps most users won't cut and paste the link, where if it just suggested `brew analytics off` many users would type it.
msla 4y ago
> opt-in telemetry doesn't work. Then don't do telemetry at all. Google doesn't have a right to data.
- geodel 4y ago
  Yeah, but they do have right to modify projects that they sponsor as they see fit.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    At which point they lose the "right" to claim it's a community project...
cwkoss 4y ago
> opt-in telemetry doesn't work That's too bad. Guess you don't get any telemetry data if you want to develop ethical open software. The answer isn't to bend your ethics. If a take a dollar from everyone but it's opt out, that's just theft with extra steps. If I make it opt in, nobody is going to give me the dollar, but that doesn't make opt out morally justifiable.
- philosopher1234 4y ago
  Why is it unethical? People in every day life constantly assume things about one another and take actions that affect one another without asking first, and this is a practical necessity, so if the reason is that "you may not do anything without me tell you its ok" I don't think thats a defensible position.
mh7 4y ago
Any evidence that telemetry actually works? (i.e makes the program better)
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Yes, the simplest example is crashes being reported. Developers can see that a specific crash is being hit by 1% of their userbase and then check the logs to see what went wrong and where the cash happened. The fix is made the program is indeed better.
  - account42 4y ago
    You can let users report crashes. You can even prepare the data for them. You can even provide a wizard that automatically opens on crashes to help upload that data. But you need to obtain informed consent. Sending data behind the user's back without ASKING FIRST is not ok. Stop doing it.
- eps 4y ago
  If it collects actionable data, yes, of course it works. Crashes, common failures, UI/UX friction points, avarage usage patterns - all can be used to prioritize work to take care of things that have the biggest impact.
  - mh7 4y ago
    I asked for actual concrete evidence, not "can be used". Is there an example of a program that was crap, implemented telemetry and then got better afterwards? (and of course controlled for factors that might have improved the program anyway) I mean since telemetry advocates are so into how useful data is, surely they must have data on whether telemetry itself works?
omginternets 4y ago
So it sounds like we can't have telemetry?
the_gipsy 4y ago
> this is an open source project, so you're free to maintain a fork without telemetry. That option is a joke. The real alternative is rust - or any non-corporate platform that isn't gonna pull these kind of stunts.
msla 4y ago
> opt-in telemetry doesn't work. Opt-out telemetry won't work when people send false data to the servers.
gowld 4y ago
Why does the dev team to optimize a use-case that the user doesn't want optimized?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 4y ago
> Additionally, this ship has long sailed, everybody does opt-out. This is a meaningless point.
wrldos 4y ago
But that's wrong. There is no position for this in a civilised society: "If we ask everyone is going to say no, so we will steal it unless someone tells us not to"
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  I think the comparison of telemetry and stealing is pretty harsh. Is opt-out telemetry unethical ... depends. If you use it in a privacy preserving way no, if you spy on your Users, sell the data for money or advertising obviously it is unethical. The hard truth is, nobody reads the manual. Opt in telemetry is often a minority, and you then work with niche data for a minority that influences your development in certain ways.
  - wrldos 4y ago
    But is that not the decision of the person who owns the data?
    - philosopher1234 4y ago
      The world is full of people making decisions for one another. Did you consent to unix files not flushing on every write() call? Its not a meaningful complaint.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    It really all boils down to meaningful consent. > if you spy on your Users In my opinion, any data collection about me or my machines that occurs without my active informed consent is "spying". This is my fundamental problem with opt-out mechanisms. They do not indicate or imply that active consent was obtained.
    - BonoboIO 4y ago
      A Flash screen at installtime that logging is on an you can disable it in the settings. Would that be enough for you?
msla 4y ago
Related, with further discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709078
dang 4y ago
(This comment was originally posted to a different thread that we merged here; that's why it now links to the page it's on.)
js8 4y ago
> To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. Why, in OSS, do you care about the users that do not care? If the users truly care they should buy support, or at least enable telemetry. If someone complains about feature getting removed - tell them to enable telemetry next time. Maybe people who want so much privacy shouldn't be expecting free support for features they want. Maybe you're worried about people like your grandma installing Linux. Then this should apply on the distribution level - there should be an opt-in setting for telemetry, that enables it in various programs being distributed (at the discretion of the package maintainers), so that user doesn't have to opt-in individually. Being opt-in will also make it compliant with EU data privacy laws.
eps 4y ago
> they don't care either way This is not true. You know it and you are being coy about it. If your "easy way to disable it" was a simple question next to that unexpected notification displayed once in response to a completely unrelated action - "Would you like to keep telemetry on?" - you bet you'd have massive opt out rates. Nobody wants telemetry. What you have is a gray pattern. The same pattern that caused the EU to clarify its cookie law to require Yes and No choice to be equally accessible. And what you have is "Accept all" and "See details". Except that yours is worse by being a one-time notification.
msla 4y ago
Telemetry in the Go toolchain: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409 https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409
account42 4y ago
To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in petty doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. They don't allow it when prompted, nor would they report it when not prompted.
msla 4y ago
There's a reason it can't be opt-in: Google intends collect information about politically sensitive software and give that information to governments who wish to punish developers.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. It does sort of hinge on the highly suspect assumption that usefulness is correlated with use. An obvious counter-example to this is something like a fire-extinguisher, which will in the ideal case just sit on a wall until it's use-by date passes and then it's discarded having never been used; or on the flip side, an incredibly byzantine workflow that could be reduced to something much simpler will appear important and useful. Even without these edge cases, interpreting statistics is really hard. Like people with PhDs who have studied these things for years still get them wrong all the time. What ends up happening more often than not is it's used as a tool to quiet the critics when pushing through unpopular changes.

cube2222 4y ago
All this boils down to "an unskilled engineer will misinterpret data even if they have it". I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. There's a lot of very simple questions you can answer very reliably, too, like "what proportion of the users are still using a certain compatibility flag".
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  My point is that scientists whose job is to interpret data and construct experiments gets this wrong on a regular basis, despite years of training in constructing experiments and interpreting data, despite peer review, despite staking their career and reputation on not making these kinds of mistakes. They still happen! A lot! Interpreting data is very hard.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. Funny, I’d assume the exact opposite. After all much of the understanding of privacy and statistics at scale was developed after 1980.
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    Normally Hacker News is ruthless with stupid comments like this, but some sort of unexamined feelings of inadequacy make Go devs a fair target. I hate this attitude.
- remram 4y ago
  Go is actually well known for dubious choices they reverted later, like not using libc, their weird major version scheme, or the absence of generics. There's a good record of charging ahead against the popular wisdom and being proven wrong.
nine_k 4y ago
Most software features are not like fire extinguishers. More than that, the interesting stats may be not even around user-visible features, but around internal mechanisms, like some cache hit rate, or how often is some branch in the compiler invoked. As long as stats are clearly inspectable, reasonably anonymized, and are opt-out, I'd be fine with sending them.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  The features that are like fire extinguishers are the ones most likely to be unjustly removed with the rationale of looking at telemetry. See for example Mozilla's bizarre decision to remove the ability to change the override the character encoding of a webpage with some half-baked detector.
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    We cant solve this problem by carving out our eyes. We must adapt to having data about the world.
    - stonogo 4y ago
      Nobody wants you to carve out your eyes. They want you to stop shoving eyes into everything you touch. Meanwhile, I'll decide what I must or must not adapt to, thank you.
      - philosopher1234 4y ago
        Read more carefully
        stonogo 4y ago
        Write more clearly
        philosopher1234 4y ago

saurik 4y ago

The argument for this being opt-in isn't about "it works better", it is about it being ethically correct. There are a ton of things that "don't work" unless you do something unethical: that doesn't mean they are OK, it doesn't mean they should be tolerated, and it doesn't mean the people who do them--and, at the end of the day, it is people who make these decisions: there is a human being who refused to say "no" and whose name we might even be able to find out--shouldn't be judged by their peers for doing these things... and that is all true even if it is (currently) legal for them to do it!!

cube2222 4y ago
You're framing this as though the "ethical" choice were obvious, or that there was a person who "knew this was the ethical thing to do, but turned a blind eye". I disagree, I think it's a very contested topic, with lots of discussion whenever it's raised here, with either side possibly being a vocal minority.
- atahanacar 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    This is a very extreme position. It's hard to take you seriously when your comment doesn't have any nuance.
    - atahanacar 4y ago
      Finding the collection of a person's data without consent unethical is not an "extreme position". Since when "consent" or more correctly "autonomy of individual" is called "extreme"? If you did the same thing in my field (medicine), you would lose your license.
      - philosopher1234 4y ago

Terretta 4y ago

> What I do think however, is that it should very clearly notify the user of this, and give them an easy way to disable it. You make a good point. As a for instance from a popular Mac-based package manager that (unexpectedly for many) defaults to telemetry from your CLI: `brew analytics off` is not hard to type after installing homebrew, but the installation text doesn't mention that; instead it points to a web page you have to read about how wonderful the analytics are before eventually finding the incantation: https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics I wonder how many people care enough to click that link, read all the "analytics are actually good for you" copy, and then change their mind to leave it on. I'm guessing almost zero? But perhaps most users won't cut and paste the link, where if it just suggested `brew analytics off` many users would type it.

msla 4y ago

> opt-in telemetry doesn't work. Then don't do telemetry at all. Google doesn't have a right to data.

geodel 4y ago
Yeah, but they do have right to modify projects that they sponsor as they see fit.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  At which point they lose the "right" to claim it's a community project...

cwkoss 4y ago

> opt-in telemetry doesn't work That's too bad. Guess you don't get any telemetry data if you want to develop ethical open software. The answer isn't to bend your ethics. If a take a dollar from everyone but it's opt out, that's just theft with extra steps. If I make it opt in, nobody is going to give me the dollar, but that doesn't make opt out morally justifiable.

philosopher1234 4y ago
Why is it unethical? People in every day life constantly assume things about one another and take actions that affect one another without asking first, and this is a practical necessity, so if the reason is that "you may not do anything without me tell you its ok" I don't think thats a defensible position.

mh7 4y ago

Any evidence that telemetry actually works? (i.e makes the program better)

charcircuit 4y ago
Yes, the simplest example is crashes being reported. Developers can see that a specific crash is being hit by 1% of their userbase and then check the logs to see what went wrong and where the cash happened. The fix is made the program is indeed better.
- account42 4y ago
  You can let users report crashes. You can even prepare the data for them. You can even provide a wizard that automatically opens on crashes to help upload that data. But you need to obtain informed consent. Sending data behind the user's back without ASKING FIRST is not ok. Stop doing it.
eps 4y ago
If it collects actionable data, yes, of course it works. Crashes, common failures, UI/UX friction points, avarage usage patterns - all can be used to prioritize work to take care of things that have the biggest impact.
- mh7 4y ago
  I asked for actual concrete evidence, not "can be used". Is there an example of a program that was crap, implemented telemetry and then got better afterwards? (and of course controlled for factors that might have improved the program anyway) I mean since telemetry advocates are so into how useful data is, surely they must have data on whether telemetry itself works?

omginternets 4y ago

So it sounds like we can't have telemetry?

the_gipsy 4y ago

> this is an open source project, so you're free to maintain a fork without telemetry. That option is a joke. The real alternative is rust - or any non-corporate platform that isn't gonna pull these kind of stunts.

msla 4y ago

> opt-in telemetry doesn't work. Opt-out telemetry won't work when people send false data to the servers.

gowld 4y ago

Why does the dev team to optimize a use-case that the user doesn't want optimized?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JohnFen 4y ago

> Additionally, this ship has long sailed, everybody does opt-out. This is a meaningless point.

wrldos 4y ago

But that's wrong. There is no position for this in a civilised society: "If we ask everyone is going to say no, so we will steal it unless someone tells us not to"

BonoboIO 4y ago
I think the comparison of telemetry and stealing is pretty harsh. Is opt-out telemetry unethical ... depends. If you use it in a privacy preserving way no, if you spy on your Users, sell the data for money or advertising obviously it is unethical. The hard truth is, nobody reads the manual. Opt in telemetry is often a minority, and you then work with niche data for a minority that influences your development in certain ways.
- wrldos 4y ago
  But is that not the decision of the person who owns the data?
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    The world is full of people making decisions for one another. Did you consent to unix files not flushing on every write() call? Its not a meaningful complaint.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It really all boils down to meaningful consent. > if you spy on your Users In my opinion, any data collection about me or my machines that occurs without my active informed consent is "spying". This is my fundamental problem with opt-out mechanisms. They do not indicate or imply that active consent was obtained.
  - BonoboIO 4y ago
    A Flash screen at installtime that logging is on an you can disable it in the settings. Would that be enough for you?

msla 4y ago

Related, with further discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709078

dang 4y ago

(This comment was originally posted to a different thread that we merged here; that's why it now links to the page it's on.)

js8 4y ago

> To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in telemetry doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. Why, in OSS, do you care about the users that do not care? If the users truly care they should buy support, or at least enable telemetry. If someone complains about feature getting removed - tell them to enable telemetry next time. Maybe people who want so much privacy shouldn't be expecting free support for features they want. Maybe you're worried about people like your grandma installing Linux. Then this should apply on the distribution level - there should be an opt-in setting for telemetry, that enables it in various programs being distributed (at the discretion of the package maintainers), so that user doesn't have to opt-in individually. Being opt-in will also make it compliant with EU data privacy laws.

eps 4y ago

> they don't care either way This is not true. You know it and you are being coy about it. If your "easy way to disable it" was a simple question next to that unexpected notification displayed once in response to a completely unrelated action - "Would you like to keep telemetry on?" - you bet you'd have massive opt out rates. Nobody wants telemetry. What you have is a gray pattern. The same pattern that caused the EU to clarify its cookie law to require Yes and No choice to be equally accessible. And what you have is "Accept all" and "See details". Except that yours is worse by being a one-time notification.

msla 4y ago

Telemetry in the Go toolchain: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409 https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409

account42 4y ago

To anybody complaining that this should be opt-in: opt-in petty doesn't work. The reason for this is that most people don't care, but they don't care either way. They don't allow it when prompted, nor would they report it when not prompted.

msla 4y ago

There's a reason it can't be opt-in: Google intends collect information about politically sensitive software and give that information to governments who wish to punish developers.