8 ms·

Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake

• fortyseven 4y ago
  As someone who was considering getting some Go and Rust under his belt, they've saved me a lot of time. This whole telemetry nonsense has ensured I won't waste my time investing it in Go. Great job.
  • Operyl 4y ago
    Uh, what? The Go team introduced an idea, opt out telemetry with a one week delay before it was sent. Users said it wasn’t great, overwhelmingly. The Go team heard the feedback and made it opt in. What’s the problem, that’s a good thing.
    • Patrickmi 4y ago
      People are naive, am sure he doesn’t know that rust has telemetry
      • twilysparkle 4y ago
        I'm not aware of rust hanging any telemetry
        • steveklabnik 4y ago
          Rustup was going to add it, some work was done, and then it was abandoned. This was years ago. https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/pull/1642 https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/pull/1642
          • twilysparkle 4y ago
            Interesting. I'd assume that the installer is one of the better places to get this information too.
• iforgotpassword 4y ago
  > For every kilobyte of Go code available on GitHub, GitLab, and other Git forges, there are unknowable megabytes of private Go code that will never see the light of day (or maybe they will if LAPSUS$ decides to make that company a target). > Without knowing what ports of Go are used, the Go team can’t make sure that the right time is spent on maintaining those ports. Am I being overly pragmatic if not selfish for thinking this is absolutely fine? If you use a free tool behind closed doors to make money and don't want to opt-in to telemetry, then I couldn't care less if the go team doesn't make go work better for your use case. Meanwhile I'm developing my open source project with telemetry turned on, ?????, PROFIT.
  • jonhohle 4y ago
    i.e. there are 10s-100s of millions publicly available LoC, but we really need to see your private workflow without your consent.
    • mariusor 4y ago
      I remember people pointed out that Google already knows this, unless you go out of your way to use a company wide GOPROXY. Every time you sync your dependencies with go mod, you tell google what you're doing.
  • str3wer 4y ago
    also why mentioning a group of kids that bought stolen employee credentials and got arrested for it?
    • richbell 4y ago
      It's a joke referring to their practice of dumping companies' internal source code publicly.
• pjc50 4y ago
  Reminded of a post I saw the other day referencing Clausewitz to say "if your ideal military strategy is politically unachievable, it's not the ideal strategy". If going for opt-out telemetry makes your customers hate you and you're forced to retreat under a hail of fire, going opt-in is not a mistake. There's also a philosophical problem in going too deep into "customers don't know what they want" and A/B testing everything to death: you end up using it as a substitute for dialogue. Ultimately customers are making conscious decisions. You have to make the case rather than assert that it's "better" from behind your metrics dashboard.
  • Uvix 4y ago
    In that scenario, not going opt-out is not a mistake. But going opt-in probably is a mistake, because the data will be useless, so it’s a waste of time to implement.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Why would data be useless?
      • Jailbird 4y ago
        I'd say there are times when bad data is worse than no data. Consider that the farther away you get from it, the parties involved are either unaware or unwilling to treat it as bad data, so they make make harmful decisions.
        • tjoff 4y ago
          And opt-out or even mandatory data is without doubt quite bad to start with. And the interpretation of the data is rarely flawless or even pretends to be objective. So if someone says that opt-in data is useless, I'd say that out-out data is just as useless. And then we have to pretend that implementation, collection and analysis and then further actions would make it worthwhile.
      • michaelt 4y ago
• spicyusername 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, the proposal came from a Google employee. Google has a reputation of taking user data and feeding it into piles of linear algebra in order to skew its search results to match your existing biases or whatever the hell else people do with linear algebra. Right. We live in an age now where gigantic, powerful, organizations are ruining everything to privilege a fantastically small few. They have consistently shown a complete lack of any moral compass and a willingness to do absolutely anything necessary to increase their power or continue to enrich themselves. If we lived in any other age, people might tolerate this, but we don't, and therefore everyone is well within their right to mutiny, regardless of how interesting a technical solution this is.
• aatd86 4y ago
  They should simply allow for people to pick their default at installation. (so at download) Even better if the go tool were to have a `go update` with a `telemetry-off` flag or something. (and possibly a prompt to remind people otherwise they will complain again) Problem solved.
  • jonhohle 4y ago
    `telemetry-on` flag. Sending data to third parties should _never_ be implicit or the default. Every PM, marketer, and mid-level manager needs to be firmly reminded that this is grossly invasive, user-hostile, impolite, and creepy. Without an explicit agreement, it could even run afoul of wiretapping laws (unresolved in courts, as far as I’m aware).
    • majorhelmet 4y ago
      I still think it depends on the telemetry itself. Companies knowing my location at all times? Disgusting and creepy. Company knowing I ran `go help` 200x as opposed to running `go build` 10x is fine imho.
    • aatd86 4y ago
      It depends on the previously installed default. When you 'go upgrade' your compiler, if telemetry was off it should stay off. No need to further specify in most cases. If telemetry was on, you might want to turn it off, however.
• groestl 4y ago
  > The problem of scrying into the unknowable People really need to accept that they can't and shouldn't have full introspection into everything they're ever interested in. Even if it's a thing they care about (like their own homepage or programming language). Sure it's nice to get feedback. Sure it's nice to know that somebody uses it. But putting a tracker on everything with the argument of "will help me provide a better service", forgoing informed consent.. It's wrong when it's done on an institutional level, whether it's companies or the goverment, and it's wrong when individuals do that.
  • junon 4y ago
    The new owners of Audacity did this and then gaslit the community about it for weeks, despite constant, almost unanimous backlash.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      It's right there in the name. But the creators (someone trying to be "owners" of sowmth5 that is just a name, lol) has the foresight to make it free and open source, so we have Tencity, the original software with a new name.
      • junon 4y ago
        I'm not sure what it is you're saying.
        • tired-turtle 4y ago
          (to have the audacity to do something unacceptable)
          • junon 4y ago
            Ah thanks :D
    • LegionMammal978 4y ago
• speedgoose 4y ago
  Respecting the users wishes isn’t a mistake. For sure it may have a few digits less of accuracy in some dashboards but who cares. The consensus was that opt-in was the best solution, and thankfully Google went with the best solution.
  • remus 4y ago
    > For sure it may have a few digits less of accuracy in some dashboards but who cares. You could argue that it's ultimately the users who suffer. Telemetry helps guide development, so it's harder for developers to know what to focus their efforts on.
    • speedgoose 4y ago
      But the users can still report issues. And Golang also has the yearly survey that gives much more valuable inputs than telemetry could track IMHO.
      • xena 4y ago
        Assuming every Go user on the planet fills it out.
        • speedgoose 4y ago
          They don’t have to care about the super rare cases, and in practice they never did. The survey has already a more than big enough sample to take the right decisions.
      • remus 4y ago
        > But the users can still report issues. They can, but do they? Russ' very first blog post gave several examples where major issues slipped under the radar because they went unreported. The example that sticks in my mind is that they accidentally introduced a dependency on a c compiler on Mac that was not reported for over a year simply because users assumed it was meant to be a dependency.
      • 4y ago
• yalue 4y ago
  Here's an idea for how to maintain Go moving forward: keep making the damn tool however you want. The thing never would have existed in the first place if they had started with an industry survey. It was created to address a perceived need, by the people with the need, for themselves. This model is perfectly fine moving forward. Some industrial user wants a new Go feature or bugfix? Great. If it's enough of a problem, they can fix it and upstream a patch. That's how open source software is always supposed to work. Telemetry does nothing to improve this situation. If the Go team at google no longer has any ideas for what to work on (as must be the case if they're wasting their time on dumb crap like forced google spyware in a compiler) then they should just stop. Maybe focus on accepting PRs from people with ideas and strong enough motivation to work on them. I mean, there are 5000+ issues and 330 open PRs on the go github right now, so that should be plenty to keep them occupied. On top of that, how can literal thousands of issues not be a strong enough source of actionable usage information that they saw fit to try to get more? Do they plan on wrapping up all the open issues before looking at telemetry?
  • oplaadpunt 4y ago
    I really appreciate this point, and I think it applies very broadly. Good design comes from a coherent, individual (or group) vision. Citing examples will only incite discussions, because everyone has a different needs and ideas, but the things I most appreciate in tech and art share this common aspect. As I see it, relying on excessive telemetry, surveys, focus-groups, etc is a bit of an indication that nobody at the top has a strong idea of where to take the project.
    • fbdab103 4y ago
      Which is strange coming from ~Go~ Google. The community loudly demanded features for years which ~Go~ Google said were unnecessary (dependency management, monotonic time, etc). Weird to think that telemetry would do anything to change their opinions when the project has always done what it wants. Edit: fighting the markup trying to get strikethrough to work
  • mseepgood 4y ago
    > if they had started with an industry survey They already do regular surveys.
• zajio1am 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, the proposal came from a Google employee Not really. People hate opt-out telemetry regardless of who runs it.
• unxdfa 4y ago
  Good job Russ Cox. Despite initial concerns around this the right decision was made. Opt in is the morally correct choice for any software community. Notably I will opt into this where it is appropriate.
• greatgib 4y ago
  I think that the author has kind of a Stockholm syndrome. "Users are liars, so let's spy them directly to know what we want to know". It is mind blowing how, as an user/the target, you can support that. Nothing is really anonymous and your anonymous data can say a lot about you. Telemetry coming from this IP, so company x is using go. A pattern of data coming every 2 days, so their build nodes rebuild every 2 days. That kind of build pattern is there, so they are using the xxx crypto library... And when they say, let's trust Google, I would propose to Google to accept the opposite: Now they will transmit to the public telemetry of their internal systems: how many users, what do they do, how many users they block, for what reason, how many build nodes they have, how many commits, how long the go team is spending looking at telemetry reports, which website are the more visited by Google employees,... And let's see if they will accept. It's for the good of the world, why they would refuse?
  • api 4y ago
    I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it. Is this the common attitude inside Google or Silicon Valley proper these days? Privacy used to be kind of sacrosanct in the industry. What happened? I guess when surveillance driven advertising pays all the bills it has an extreme warping effect on everyone’s mentality. It’s hard to care about privacy when violating it is how you get paid. I’m increasingly wondering if we might vastly improve our society by banning or taxing the hell out of all advertising. It’s an industry that makes the world a worse place in deep and pervasive ways that go much further than just making everything ugly and obnoxious. The industry pushes a toxic relationship between people and businesses at every level.
    • michaelt 4y ago
      > Privacy used to be kind of sacrosanct in the industry. What happened? It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
    • tharne 4y ago
      > I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it. It is gross. It's also very ignorant. The author's argument basically boils down to, "I can't see an obvious major downside to this proposal, so that must mean there isn't one nor will there ever be one". How many times to we have to get burned by large companies invading our privacy and after promising not to before we wise up?
• kardianos 4y ago
  Yes, the data won't be as good. But it will still be able to catch issues like that motivated this in the first place. Knowing the goal allowed rsc to make this judgement.
• zaphar 4y ago
  Honestly, I think they should go with opt-in and make it clear to the community that the public dataset will be the sole source of decision making for future deprecations. If you want your favorite pet feature still enabled and no one using it is sending them telemetry then too bad.
• StreetChief 4y ago
  Google: "we don't want to talk to people, or hear their opinions, so we'll add telemetry to make decisions we want without including anyone else!" Also Google: removed "do no evil" so they could... Do evil... Without sounding like hypocrites.
• waweic 4y ago
  Mozilla shows time and time again that decisions based on opt-out telemetry are worse than decisions taken without telemetry at all. "Telemetry shows people aren't using this (privacy / internet freedom related) feature, so we can just remove it"
  • b112 4y ago
    While I agree, Mozilla is a horrible example. There are bugs reports with 100s of people complaining, about simple features, or broken code, and the attitude is WONTFIX. If you won't listen to users, seething, upset, annoyed over inane issues you created? If you won't fix bugs for years, because it's your pet project/feature? Then how are you even paying attention to telemetry correctly? Opt-in telemetry is only useful if you will, no matter what, implement and fix what it tells you. Mozilla, predicated upon their behaviour, clearly only uses data when it agrees with prior opinions. opt-in is useless to such an org, and opt-out isn't why it is happening. It's them. They are broken as an org.
• tacker2000 4y ago
  To be honest, the fact that Google is behind Go, is whats holding me back from getting into it. Same with React and FB. I dont really have any sympathy points left for them.
• anon23432343 4y ago
  For me every kind of telemetry, data harvesting and so on should be opt-in.
• Scubabear68 4y ago
  There are vast amounts of Go code available in the wild to study. Open source is a thing. If the Go team wants to see what features are used, go audit open source Go code. Since Go is also a Google thing, they could likely audit the presumably large sums of Google Go. Yes, you will miss unknowable amounts of code this way. Who cares?
• hedora 4y ago
  > Developers using macOS are used to just installing Xcode to make the error messages go away, so they just installed Xcode and assumed it was normal behavior. So, they don’t test go in CI on clean Mac OS installs? If this sort of issue is the rationale for the telemetry system, it sounds like they’re trying for a older, slightly-less-evil Microsoft approach where you fire QA, and just treat user machines as your test environment.
• croes 4y ago
  Consent is always opt-in
• Patrickmi 4y ago
  All these situations I blame Google not Go, sometimes people are ignorant when to differentiate Google corporation itself and the Go team
• patchymcnoodles 4y ago
  If they want to add telemetry without asking the user, then they have to fix an entire industry including Google itself. They trained the people to hard disagree with such approaches, because in the past there was way too many incidents where data was unnecessary collected and misused. Just trying to add this telemetry with opt-out in the first place shown one thing: They don't know their audience. Because if they would, if someone would have come up with that idea, everybody in the team should have screamed: "No, hell no!". You don't have the trust of your users. I get it, getting trust back is much more effort than collecting more data (even if it's with good intent). But hey, the industry put itself into this.