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Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice because people willing to answer the question is not a randomly sampled group of people and usually highly biased. You can

Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice because people willing to answer the question is not a randomly sampled group of people and usually highly biased. You can check how polling works and why it doesn't work. The problem is always how to randomly sample people and AFAIK there is no good way except randomly sample people (a.k.a telemetry). You can argue that developers shouldn't care that much about their software are being used and whether they are performing as expected, but asking nicely really is not a solution. APPENDED: PLEASE NOTE I'm saying asking nicely is not a solution to get correct data from statistical standpoint. You can argure the data accuracy is not important in this context.

ballenf 4y ago
Isn't it contradictory to "care" about how privacy objectors use Go, while denigrating those people by suppressing their voices?
hobom 4y ago
While true in general, it is really not that necessary to have a representative sample for checking whether your software works. With large enough sample size a convenience sample will find almost all of the bugs that telemetry would have found.
hn92726819 4y ago
> Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice LLVM, GCC, rust, zig, D, etc don't have telementry and they seem to be doing fine. What makes go special? They aren't trying to be more efficient than rust. It isn't more widely used than GCC. I would argue they don't need this telemetry at all.
- arp242 4y ago
  No one claimed it's essential to have telemetry or that a language literally can't do without it. After all, Go is doing fine without telemetry too. But that doesn't mean it's not useful, for Go but also gcc, or Zig, or D, or any other language. A long list of use cases is given here: https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Useful doesn't mean it should be done. There are a ton of useful things for me I don't do because it's not right to do them. Apparently as soon as a company becomes big enough, the line between convenience and ethical becomes very blurry.
    - arp242 4y ago
      > Useful doesn't mean it should be done. I never said anything about what should be done. I'm just saying it is useful, as the previous commenter said it's not.
      - hn92726819 4y ago
        When did I say it isn't useful? I said they didn't need it. They also don't need to install a kernel module that records every keystroke and memory access, but it would certainly be useful data.
- acdha 4y ago
  Have you asked core developers of those languages how they feel about this? I'd bet that you'd have near unanimous agreement that this class of information would be useful for informing support decisions. Where I'd expect difference is precisely over the question of whether it's worth the cost & trust issues. That makes me wonder whether there might be some middle-ground here where some third-party like the Linux Foundation could run a telemetry service which is highly public in both its design and collected data, and whether that would be enough that many people would be comfortable with this kind of service without Google's business reputation entering into the equation.
  - groestl 4y ago
    > useful for informing support decisions Useful does not equal ethical or legal. A lot of things would be useful to me.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Please enumerate. Go on.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Hence the second paragraph in the comment you're replying to. There's no question that this could be implemented legally but the ethical considerations are legitimate and warrant extensive discussion for an open source community. I think that the Go proposal has been derailed by a lot of hot takes based on scenarios far in excess of what's actually described, but I also think it's quite likely that many languages' core developers would look at that and agree that they don't want that information badly enough to spend time trying to negotiate those hazards.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    What if your plumber installed a camera in your bathroom for informed support decisions? Sure would be useful for him to see where you put those "biodegradable" baby wipes after the deed.
    - 4y ago
- typical182 4y ago
  FWIW, there is a proposal to add telemetry to LLVM [0] and Rust used to have telemetry [1], both off by default. Some things in the node.js world have telemetry enabled by default, like Next.js [3]. Some people are posting here as if this is already decided -- AFAICT, that's not the case. It's not even a formal proposal yet, and the stated intent was to start a conversation around something concrete. (For context, this is standard for how the Go project approaches large topics, including for example I think there were something like ~8 very detailed generics design drafts from the core Go team over ~10 years). It sounds like the Go team is going to take some time to look into some of the alternative approaches suggested in the feedback collected so far. In any event, this is obviously a topic people are very passionate about, especially opt-in vs. opt-out, but I guess I would suggest not giving up hope quite yet. [0] https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lldb-telemetry-metrics/64588/11 https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lldb-telemetry-metrics/6458... [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/issues/341 https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/issues/341 [2] https://nextjs.org/telemetry https://nextjs.org/telemetry
- Thaxll 4y ago
  C# ( net core ) has telemetry, as well as Java so it's not that it does not exists in other very popular languages. https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/terms-java-usage-metrics.html https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/terms-java-u... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr... Also the idea of GCC is more used than Go and GCC does not have telemetry so GO doesn't need it is completly unrelated. Most dev working on core tools want telemetry to improve those tools, it's invaluable data to make the right decisions.
  - jsiepkes 4y ago
    > C# ( net core ) has telemetry, as well as Java Which Java distribution? Maybe the Oracle JDK/JRE? I highly doubt the Oracle JDK/JRE has serious usage numbers because of it's (quite commercial) license.
  - squaresmile 4y ago
    > dotnet, vscode (Microsoft), golang (Google), Oracle JDK/JRE, Nextjs (Vercel), ... I wonder if there's some trend where corporate backed, large "open source/source available" projects being more open to telemetry compared to more "open community" projects. For non-corporate projects, the general thought process might be it's fine to leave efficiency gains and improvements on the table if it means violating some foundational principles. While in a business setting, those efficiency gains could be very tempting since it can translate to more money, market share or promotions and that way of thinking gets applied to the open source projects as well.
    - acdha 4y ago
      I think your analysis is correct, and would also add that corporate projects probably have both the culture of monitoring (they use it for everything else) and the expectation that they have to deadlines so they prioritize the idea of being able to ship something with the confidence that it either won't break anyone or they'll be able to know & react quickly if it does. Open source didn't used to have that same focus since it was rarely someone's job and there was more understanding that time was in short supply (“if it breaks, let me know or send a patch”).
- blibble 4y ago
  > What makes go special? it's owned by an ad company
tom-thistime 4y ago
I'm confident that you're not jumping from "asking nicely is not a solution" to "using force or deception is fine." It's just that, if the argument in my last paragraph did become widely accepted, it would lead to a pretty brutal society. (And, of course, it is becoming pretty widely accepted where software is concerned.)
Retric 4y ago
Biased sampling only matters if the bias has some relevance to what you’re investigating. There is zero reason for software telemetry to care about privacy bias.
sixbrx 4y ago
My code is on GitHub as is a large number of other peoples. They can try to compile it themselves with all the profiling and probes they want, on their own machines.
- acdha 4y ago
  That's not the problem they talking about. It would be useful in some cases (and I'd be surprised if they haven't already considered experiments along those lines) but what you have on GitHub doesn't easily tell them about your build or runtime environments. Here's a long list of questions Russ Cox was interested in - notice how many of them would really want something like “what is your CI configuration?”, and consider that while they could sample GitHub Actions configuration that doesn't tell them anything about the much more varied set of projects who don't use that service: https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses
  - api 4y ago
    That's a very forced, contrived, un-impressive list. It reads like someone told them "hey, we want telemetry, please make up a list of uses that will sound plausible to programmers to justify it. Be sure to use big words like histogram a lot to shut down objections by sounding real smart." Most of these things are in the category of bug prioritization. Why don't you... you know... talk to users? If you want some statistics (oh sorry, histograms), maybe pull down the gigabytes and gigabytes of Go code residing on public repositories and places like GitHub and analyze all that. That'll tell you a ton about how people structure their projects, what architectures they target, etc.
fsflover 4y ago
By using telemetry you are losing the statistics from people who block it, i.e., the most tech-savy users.
- justinclift 4y ago
  This may be by design, as it punishes those who dare to value their privacy. eg, some options: a) No telemetry. All users of the Go language get equal treatment/consideration by the developers ("best guess"). b) With telemetry. The users who opt out are thereby excluded from consideration ("punished"). It seems like over time, option b) would lead to problems for the Go language as the developers base their decisions on incomplete information, whilst believing that information is somehow more complete than option a).
  - arp242 4y ago
    I'm not entirely sure how biased the data would be; there needs to be a correlation between "frobs with telemetry" (whether it's opt-in or opt-out doesn't even matter) and any other metric. I'm not so sure there is one, although perhaps there could be – we need telemetry to demonstrate that :-) Questions about bias in reported data are legitimate and a genuine topic of concern, but this: > This may be by design, as it punishes those who dare to value their privacy. Is just veering off in the conspiratorial.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      > Questions about bias in reported data are legitimate and a genuine topic of concern The problem is an obvious one but doesn't seem to be considered. :( > Is just veering off in the conspiratorial. Punishing people who value their privacy seems like it'd be strategically useful to Google, an ad company with demonstrated intelligent but sometimes ethically challenged people. ;)
esskay 4y ago
The bigger question is why do they suddenly need this to such a degree that they need to do a backhand tactic to get the data? Most other programming languages have no such data and have survived and thrived for years, decades even before Go existed.
- puszczyk 4y ago
  It seems like it’s only a proposal at this point? Generics were also controversial and it took multiple iterations and years to get them done. I wouldn’t call it “suddenly”. Also, why do they need the data “suddenly”? What do you suggest?
- acdha 4y ago
  It's neither sudden nor backhanded — if either of those characterizations were accurate, we'd have learned about it from something shipping. Announcing it publicly before implementing anything and having a number of privacy protections built-in suggests neither is a fair description. Reading through the use-cases at https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses one thing to consider is that these are the kinds of things people care about as a project matures — once you have a large number of people depending on your project, you have to worry more about unintended consequences as you evolve and since the user community has grown larger and the project more stable it's also harder to know whether the people you hear from regularly are representative. When a project is small or mostly used by enthusiasts you can be more confident that your understanding of what people are doing is relatively accurate but that just isn't true over time. For example, how many millions of Java developers never contact Oracle or the OpenJDK developers throughout their entire careers?
AlexandrB 4y ago
The same argument could be made by many other entities include government bureaucrats and LEOs. Justifying data collection with "it makes my job easier" is a very slippery slope IMO.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
groestl 4y ago
> Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice Well, to bad. Because if you don't, you've built a piece of malware, by definition. You need to ask, live with bias, and draw your conclusions accordingly.
deafpolygon 4y ago
> Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice Who cares?! It's about respect for individuals and respect for their privacy. Any kind of telemetry should be opt-in no matter how you spin the PR.
salawat 4y ago
You seem to have a problem understanding the concept of consent. Allow me to help you. You ask first. If the answer is no, you don't do it. If you cannot master this skill, or refuse to, you are embarking on becoming one of the most problematic demographics on Earth. There is no excuse for not asking, and honoring the answer. Sending data is not free, and I guarantee your telemetry is not that important, neither is your vaunted sampling. All you want is to know who your Users are, and the fact is, that is fundamentally gated behind them wanting to even bother telling you.
tinus_hn 4y ago
It’s a simple value proposition: want priorities for your problems and use cases? Turn on the telemetry. Just like answering polls makes more of a difference than voting.

ballenf 4y ago

Isn't it contradictory to "care" about how privacy objectors use Go, while denigrating those people by suppressing their voices?

hobom 4y ago

While true in general, it is really not that necessary to have a representative sample for checking whether your software works. With large enough sample size a convenience sample will find almost all of the bugs that telemetry would have found.

hn92726819 4y ago

> Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice LLVM, GCC, rust, zig, D, etc don't have telementry and they seem to be doing fine. What makes go special? They aren't trying to be more efficient than rust. It isn't more widely used than GCC. I would argue they don't need this telemetry at all.

arp242 4y ago
No one claimed it's essential to have telemetry or that a language literally can't do without it. After all, Go is doing fine without telemetry too. But that doesn't mean it's not useful, for Go but also gcc, or Zig, or D, or any other language. A long list of use cases is given here: https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Useful doesn't mean it should be done. There are a ton of useful things for me I don't do because it's not right to do them. Apparently as soon as a company becomes big enough, the line between convenience and ethical becomes very blurry.
  - arp242 4y ago
    > Useful doesn't mean it should be done. I never said anything about what should be done. I'm just saying it is useful, as the previous commenter said it's not.
    - hn92726819 4y ago
      When did I say it isn't useful? I said they didn't need it. They also don't need to install a kernel module that records every keystroke and memory access, but it would certainly be useful data.
acdha 4y ago
Have you asked core developers of those languages how they feel about this? I'd bet that you'd have near unanimous agreement that this class of information would be useful for informing support decisions. Where I'd expect difference is precisely over the question of whether it's worth the cost & trust issues. That makes me wonder whether there might be some middle-ground here where some third-party like the Linux Foundation could run a telemetry service which is highly public in both its design and collected data, and whether that would be enough that many people would be comfortable with this kind of service without Google's business reputation entering into the equation.
- groestl 4y ago
  > useful for informing support decisions Useful does not equal ethical or legal. A lot of things would be useful to me.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Please enumerate. Go on.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Hence the second paragraph in the comment you're replying to. There's no question that this could be implemented legally but the ethical considerations are legitimate and warrant extensive discussion for an open source community. I think that the Go proposal has been derailed by a lot of hot takes based on scenarios far in excess of what's actually described, but I also think it's quite likely that many languages' core developers would look at that and agree that they don't want that information badly enough to spend time trying to negotiate those hazards.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  What if your plumber installed a camera in your bathroom for informed support decisions? Sure would be useful for him to see where you put those "biodegradable" baby wipes after the deed.
  - 4y ago
typical182 4y ago
FWIW, there is a proposal to add telemetry to LLVM [0] and Rust used to have telemetry [1], both off by default. Some things in the node.js world have telemetry enabled by default, like Next.js [3]. Some people are posting here as if this is already decided -- AFAICT, that's not the case. It's not even a formal proposal yet, and the stated intent was to start a conversation around something concrete. (For context, this is standard for how the Go project approaches large topics, including for example I think there were something like ~8 very detailed generics design drafts from the core Go team over ~10 years). It sounds like the Go team is going to take some time to look into some of the alternative approaches suggested in the feedback collected so far. In any event, this is obviously a topic people are very passionate about, especially opt-in vs. opt-out, but I guess I would suggest not giving up hope quite yet. [0] https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lldb-telemetry-metrics/64588/11 https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lldb-telemetry-metrics/6458... [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/issues/341 https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/issues/341 [2] https://nextjs.org/telemetry https://nextjs.org/telemetry
Thaxll 4y ago
C# ( net core ) has telemetry, as well as Java so it's not that it does not exists in other very popular languages. https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/terms-java-usage-metrics.html https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/terms-java-u... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr... Also the idea of GCC is more used than Go and GCC does not have telemetry so GO doesn't need it is completly unrelated. Most dev working on core tools want telemetry to improve those tools, it's invaluable data to make the right decisions.
- jsiepkes 4y ago
  > C# ( net core ) has telemetry, as well as Java Which Java distribution? Maybe the Oracle JDK/JRE? I highly doubt the Oracle JDK/JRE has serious usage numbers because of it's (quite commercial) license.
- squaresmile 4y ago
  > dotnet, vscode (Microsoft), golang (Google), Oracle JDK/JRE, Nextjs (Vercel), ... I wonder if there's some trend where corporate backed, large "open source/source available" projects being more open to telemetry compared to more "open community" projects. For non-corporate projects, the general thought process might be it's fine to leave efficiency gains and improvements on the table if it means violating some foundational principles. While in a business setting, those efficiency gains could be very tempting since it can translate to more money, market share or promotions and that way of thinking gets applied to the open source projects as well.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I think your analysis is correct, and would also add that corporate projects probably have both the culture of monitoring (they use it for everything else) and the expectation that they have to deadlines so they prioritize the idea of being able to ship something with the confidence that it either won't break anyone or they'll be able to know & react quickly if it does. Open source didn't used to have that same focus since it was rarely someone's job and there was more understanding that time was in short supply (“if it breaks, let me know or send a patch”).
blibble 4y ago
> What makes go special? it's owned by an ad company

tom-thistime 4y ago

I'm confident that you're not jumping from "asking nicely is not a solution" to "using force or deception is fine." It's just that, if the argument in my last paragraph did become widely accepted, it would lead to a pretty brutal society. (And, of course, it is becoming pretty widely accepted where software is concerned.)

Retric 4y ago

Biased sampling only matters if the bias has some relevance to what you’re investigating. There is zero reason for software telemetry to care about privacy bias.

sixbrx 4y ago

My code is on GitHub as is a large number of other peoples. They can try to compile it themselves with all the profiling and probes they want, on their own machines.

acdha 4y ago
That's not the problem they talking about. It would be useful in some cases (and I'd be surprised if they haven't already considered experiments along those lines) but what you have on GitHub doesn't easily tell them about your build or runtime environments. Here's a long list of questions Russ Cox was interested in - notice how many of them would really want something like “what is your CI configuration?”, and consider that while they could sample GitHub Actions configuration that doesn't tell them anything about the much more varied set of projects who don't use that service: https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses
- api 4y ago
  That's a very forced, contrived, un-impressive list. It reads like someone told them "hey, we want telemetry, please make up a list of uses that will sound plausible to programmers to justify it. Be sure to use big words like histogram a lot to shut down objections by sounding real smart." Most of these things are in the category of bug prioritization. Why don't you... you know... talk to users? If you want some statistics (oh sorry, histograms), maybe pull down the gigabytes and gigabytes of Go code residing on public repositories and places like GitHub and analyze all that. That'll tell you a ton about how people structure their projects, what architectures they target, etc.

fsflover 4y ago

By using telemetry you are losing the statistics from people who block it, i.e., the most tech-savy users.

justinclift 4y ago
This may be by design, as it punishes those who dare to value their privacy. eg, some options: a) No telemetry. All users of the Go language get equal treatment/consideration by the developers ("best guess"). b) With telemetry. The users who opt out are thereby excluded from consideration ("punished"). It seems like over time, option b) would lead to problems for the Go language as the developers base their decisions on incomplete information, whilst believing that information is somehow more complete than option a).
- arp242 4y ago
  I'm not entirely sure how biased the data would be; there needs to be a correlation between "frobs with telemetry" (whether it's opt-in or opt-out doesn't even matter) and any other metric. I'm not so sure there is one, although perhaps there could be – we need telemetry to demonstrate that :-) Questions about bias in reported data are legitimate and a genuine topic of concern, but this: > This may be by design, as it punishes those who dare to value their privacy. Is just veering off in the conspiratorial.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > Questions about bias in reported data are legitimate and a genuine topic of concern The problem is an obvious one but doesn't seem to be considered. :( > Is just veering off in the conspiratorial. Punishing people who value their privacy seems like it'd be strategically useful to Google, an ad company with demonstrated intelligent but sometimes ethically challenged people. ;)

esskay 4y ago

The bigger question is why do they suddenly need this to such a degree that they need to do a backhand tactic to get the data? Most other programming languages have no such data and have survived and thrived for years, decades even before Go existed.

puszczyk 4y ago
It seems like it’s only a proposal at this point? Generics were also controversial and it took multiple iterations and years to get them done. I wouldn’t call it “suddenly”. Also, why do they need the data “suddenly”? What do you suggest?
acdha 4y ago
It's neither sudden nor backhanded — if either of those characterizations were accurate, we'd have learned about it from something shipping. Announcing it publicly before implementing anything and having a number of privacy protections built-in suggests neither is a fair description. Reading through the use-cases at https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses one thing to consider is that these are the kinds of things people care about as a project matures — once you have a large number of people depending on your project, you have to worry more about unintended consequences as you evolve and since the user community has grown larger and the project more stable it's also harder to know whether the people you hear from regularly are representative. When a project is small or mostly used by enthusiasts you can be more confident that your understanding of what people are doing is relatively accurate but that just isn't true over time. For example, how many millions of Java developers never contact Oracle or the OpenJDK developers throughout their entire careers?

AlexandrB 4y ago

The same argument could be made by many other entities include government bureaucrats and LEOs. Justifying data collection with "it makes my job easier" is a very slippery slope IMO.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

groestl 4y ago

> Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice Well, to bad. Because if you don't, you've built a piece of malware, by definition. You need to ask, live with bias, and draw your conclusions accordingly.

deafpolygon 4y ago

> Asking nicely doesn't work in pratice Who cares?! It's about respect for individuals and respect for their privacy. Any kind of telemetry should be opt-in no matter how you spin the PR.

salawat 4y ago

You seem to have a problem understanding the concept of consent. Allow me to help you. You ask first. If the answer is no, you don't do it. If you cannot master this skill, or refuse to, you are embarking on becoming one of the most problematic demographics on Earth. There is no excuse for not asking, and honoring the answer. Sending data is not free, and I guarantee your telemetry is not that important, neither is your vaunted sampling. All you want is to know who your Users are, and the fact is, that is fundamentally gated behind them wanting to even bother telling you.

tinus_hn 4y ago

It’s a simple value proposition: want priorities for your problems and use cases? Turn on the telemetry. Just like answering polls makes more of a difference than voting.