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The problem with opt-out telemetry is that as soon as you admit people won't voluntarily turn it on, you've admitted it's a user hostile behavior. The usability

The problem with opt-out telemetry is that as soon as you admit people won't voluntarily turn it on, you've admitted it's a user hostile behavior. The usability of opt-out doesn't override the reality that it's not ethical to do it. I think if the Go authors do move forward with this proposal in any form, a fork is guaranteed. I've heard multiple sources express interest in doing so already.

cube2222 4y ago
> The problem with opt-out telemetry is that as soon as you admit people won't voluntarily turn it on, you've admitted it's a user hostile behavior. That is in fact not the case. This is just one possible explanation for users not turning it on, one that I don't believe is even close to a meaningful amount in the grand scale of things. As I wrote in the first message, a huge amount of people don't care either way. They won't turn it off if they're prompted, but they also wouldn't bother turning it on. They just don't care. I'm one of these people.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > As I wrote in the first message, a huge amount of people don't care either way Do you have any data to support that claim? Anecdotally, almost all programmers I've spoken to have expressed some kind of complaint about how much data all our devices collect these days. Many of them even saying that they're afraid to speak their mind on the Internet because they know someone might connect their words to their true identity. A large number of non-programmers have mentioned to me how freaked out they are by their Android phones showing them ads for things they've just mentioned in proximity of their phones for the first time. Considering the massive surveillance we're under, I think that "most people care, and don't want telemetry if given the choice" is much more precise than "most people don't care".
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    You seems to conflate telemetry with spying Uploading crash log to devs to help them fix bugs Or stats about project sizes So they are aware how their users use their soft and can optimize
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      What is the exact difference between spying and telemetry that user hasn't consented to?
      - acdha 4y ago
        If we consider the dictionary definition spying has a sense of personal and private information being collected. For telemetry, one of the first questions would be whether the data being collected is the same — for example, something like the version of the C compiler you have installed doesn't seem like nearly as sensitive. The other part is the question of exactly what consent means in this context. If I sneak into your house, I'm spying. If I record what you do when visiting my house, that's arguably still spying. If I say I'm giving you a free meal but at the bottom of the menu there's a warning that I use statistics about which meals are the most popular unless you ask me not to, that doesn't feel like it's in the same category as the previous two even if there's a pretty strong argument that it's best to ask you the first time you show up.
        bheadmaster 4y ago
        I don't think such real-world analogies serve any useful purpose, they only make things more confusing. I'd define "spying" as any data collection that users are not informed of. Go tool is an open-source development tool - people expect open-source development tools to serve the users, not the developers (to the detriment of the user). That's the whole point of the whole open-source (and free-software) movement. [A significant number of] users do not want their tools to send any data from their machines that they themselves haven't allowed it to. To create an open-source development tool that sends data by default is a deception tactic - it works because most people trust open-source tools, and because most people won't know the data is being sent by that particular tool. The deception part is what bugs me the most. I may or may not be against telemetry in general, but I am definitely against deception of the users. And providing a few lines in the release notes counts as "informing the users" as much as changing a few lines in the TOS counts as "informing the users" - in my opinion, doesn't.
mattmcknight 4y ago
> as you admit people won't voluntarily turn it on, you've admitted it's a user hostile behavior That is presuming people aren't turning it on because they don't like it, while the reason they aren't turning it on could be they are lazy and don't want to do any extra work. If you had a HTML sanitizer that most people weren't turning on, you might just turn it on by default to improve safety (like Rails did at one point). Just because people weren't turning something on themselves doesn't make turning it on by default "hostile".
- anonymousab 4y ago
  > That is presuming people aren't turning it on because they don't like it, while the reason they aren't turning it on could be they are lazy and don't want to do any extra work The solution in these scenarios is to simply ask the user, with no default, whether they want telemetry to be enabled or disabled. To do so in a modal or required dialogue in fresh install and the update in question. If the telemetry is worth changing defaults to you then IMO it should be worth a bit of friction to introduce it more ethnically.
  - cube2222 4y ago
    I think a lot of users don't actually interact directly with the CLI. Think IDEs, editors, CI/CD. You'd be cutting them out, again skewing the stats heavily.
    - anonymousab 4y ago
      That's true. I think this would therefore need to be a bit of a breaking change for that tooling - systems that integrate with Go would need to be updated to deal with this prompt. Whether that's showing it to users or autofilling an answer with a --telemetry==x flag, that's up to them and their community. Is that painful? Yes. Would it turn some people away from Go through this kind of friction? Sure. IMO those kinds of costs and pain points should be necessary considerations of adding telemetry. Worth at least a minor version change, and therefore not too crazy that it would cause some annoyance.
  - 4y ago

cube2222 4y ago

> The problem with opt-out telemetry is that as soon as you admit people won't voluntarily turn it on, you've admitted it's a user hostile behavior. That is in fact not the case. This is just one possible explanation for users not turning it on, one that I don't believe is even close to a meaningful amount in the grand scale of things. As I wrote in the first message, a huge amount of people don't care either way. They won't turn it off if they're prompted, but they also wouldn't bother turning it on. They just don't care. I'm one of these people.

bheadmaster 4y ago
> As I wrote in the first message, a huge amount of people don't care either way Do you have any data to support that claim? Anecdotally, almost all programmers I've spoken to have expressed some kind of complaint about how much data all our devices collect these days. Many of them even saying that they're afraid to speak their mind on the Internet because they know someone might connect their words to their true identity. A large number of non-programmers have mentioned to me how freaked out they are by their Android phones showing them ads for things they've just mentioned in proximity of their phones for the first time. Considering the massive surveillance we're under, I think that "most people care, and don't want telemetry if given the choice" is much more precise than "most people don't care".
- hardware2win 4y ago
  You seems to conflate telemetry with spying Uploading crash log to devs to help them fix bugs Or stats about project sizes So they are aware how their users use their soft and can optimize
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    What is the exact difference between spying and telemetry that user hasn't consented to?
    - acdha 4y ago
      If we consider the dictionary definition spying has a sense of personal and private information being collected. For telemetry, one of the first questions would be whether the data being collected is the same — for example, something like the version of the C compiler you have installed doesn't seem like nearly as sensitive. The other part is the question of exactly what consent means in this context. If I sneak into your house, I'm spying. If I record what you do when visiting my house, that's arguably still spying. If I say I'm giving you a free meal but at the bottom of the menu there's a warning that I use statistics about which meals are the most popular unless you ask me not to, that doesn't feel like it's in the same category as the previous two even if there's a pretty strong argument that it's best to ask you the first time you show up.
      - bheadmaster 4y ago
        I don't think such real-world analogies serve any useful purpose, they only make things more confusing. I'd define "spying" as any data collection that users are not informed of. Go tool is an open-source development tool - people expect open-source development tools to serve the users, not the developers (to the detriment of the user). That's the whole point of the whole open-source (and free-software) movement. [A significant number of] users do not want their tools to send any data from their machines that they themselves haven't allowed it to. To create an open-source development tool that sends data by default is a deception tactic - it works because most people trust open-source tools, and because most people won't know the data is being sent by that particular tool. The deception part is what bugs me the most. I may or may not be against telemetry in general, but I am definitely against deception of the users. And providing a few lines in the release notes counts as "informing the users" as much as changing a few lines in the TOS counts as "informing the users" - in my opinion, doesn't.

mattmcknight 4y ago

> as you admit people won't voluntarily turn it on, you've admitted it's a user hostile behavior That is presuming people aren't turning it on because they don't like it, while the reason they aren't turning it on could be they are lazy and don't want to do any extra work. If you had a HTML sanitizer that most people weren't turning on, you might just turn it on by default to improve safety (like Rails did at one point). Just because people weren't turning something on themselves doesn't make turning it on by default "hostile".

anonymousab 4y ago
> That is presuming people aren't turning it on because they don't like it, while the reason they aren't turning it on could be they are lazy and don't want to do any extra work The solution in these scenarios is to simply ask the user, with no default, whether they want telemetry to be enabled or disabled. To do so in a modal or required dialogue in fresh install and the update in question. If the telemetry is worth changing defaults to you then IMO it should be worth a bit of friction to introduce it more ethnically.
- cube2222 4y ago
  I think a lot of users don't actually interact directly with the CLI. Think IDEs, editors, CI/CD. You'd be cutting them out, again skewing the stats heavily.
  - anonymousab 4y ago
    That's true. I think this would therefore need to be a bit of a breaking change for that tooling - systems that integrate with Go would need to be updated to deal with this prompt. Whether that's showing it to users or autofilling an answer with a --telemetry==x flag, that's up to them and their community. Is that painful? Yes. Would it turn some people away from Go through this kind of friction? Sure. IMO those kinds of costs and pain points should be necessary considerations of adding telemetry. Worth at least a minor version change, and therefore not too crazy that it would cause some annoyance.
- 4y ago