The EU approach to privacy (eroded by lobbying and lack of control over US companies) is that citizens have a right over their information. They can ask what personal information a company has on them, ask that it be corrected or deleted. This has resulted in companies that are more careful with data.

Whenever I read a post like yours I immediately think of so-called "useful innocents", to put it euphemistically [1]. Fighting for a non-goal of better open source through analytics (get real), corporate dominance and fewer rights for individuals.

Companies don't need analytics to improve software. They certainly don't need analytics from Google, the leading spyware-as-a-service company in the world.

I expect open source to become better through writing quality software, engaging with users and if need be doing some surveys or organsising other reach-out initiatives in the open. Not analytics turned on by default but it's-ok-cause-we-tell-you-we're-fucking-you.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

For me, my answers are yes no yes. A while ago, you did that, and you get an old version of the thing you just installed. With analytics, they saw that many people forget to update before installing after a while, so they added an update step in that case.

I call that progress, no matter how small. I didn't change that and to you didn't change that. The brew devs changed that. Maybe they would have changed it anyway later.. Who knows. But the fact that brew because a tiny tiny bit better because of analytics, in part from me, makes me a happier user. Now I don't need to remember to update before installing.

Of course it's not the best way to "contribute", but it's something. Definitely better than "contributing" your data to companies, like you said.

    Bash would like to record analyitics. y/n/more information
    > y
    > ls *.c
    ls would like to record information about how you use it.
    y/n/more information.
    > y
    file1.c file2.c file3.c
    > grep 'string' *.c
    grep would like to record some information about your
    usage. y/n/more information.
    > y
    file1.c:8: string
    > vim file1.c
    vim would like to record information usage, to help
    improve vim in future. y/n/more information.
    > y
    The 'C' package in vim would like to ...

I'm amazed we're even having this discussion

The very idea of your shell or file listing program sending analytics to the mothership is ridiculous. They shouldn't be even talking to a network directly. They have a set of well-defined tasks, and spying on you is not one of them.

Simple answer, Yes.

It would lead to conversations about the elephant in the room. It also alleviates the assumption I trust all providers(comprehend the EULA/ToS) and puts their actions under scrutiny. If more people realized what data is collected and by whom for whom they could make an informed, cost/benefit choice. Other useful results are, what is the applicability of that data to the project, what characteristics define the 'Trusted Partners' that data is shared with and, possibly, inject some restraint into the collectors' decisions of what to collect.

edit: removed unintended paste fragment

  $ git pull

  (long wait)

  ^c

  $ git pull

  (got distracted and had to leave keyboard for a bit)

  Can't execute program until you accept xcode license

1. paraphrasing the words

Worse, that fraction will be the statistically unusual people who bother reading and finding such options, meaning we can't derive any statistically useful results about the user base from them!

[1] http://popcon.debian.org/

By the way I think that browser history should be disabled by default too.

I remember some IM app for linux had history turned off by default. I was really surprised then.

I get that there may be money involved, but presumably self-hosting also gives them more of the information to build out what they need.

> (...)and have been trying to find people who will provide us with non-Google hosting but: we're chronically understaffed and underfunded[1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438

More like, this has resulted in things like nonsensical "Cookie warnings" that only waste the user's time.

Of course, websites that don't track their users are exempt: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm

I guess the EU didn't expect websites to cling to tracking cookies like their lives depended on them.

The law is pretty simple: If you track users, or transmit information to third parties which could track the user, you have to get the user to opt-in.

The original intention was to get rid of Facebook’s shadow profiles, which it did – in the EU, websites don’t embed Facebook’s like button anymore, but have a two-click solution, where you have to click it, then it’s actually loaded, then you can like.

That alone is worth such a law.

But according to this website: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm Cookies clearly exempt from consent according to the EU advisory body on data protection- WP29pdf include: (...) third‑party social plug‑in content‑sharing cookies, for logged‑in members of a social network.

So, I think what you say about Facebook is not true.

I was talking about non-logged in users. The shadow profiles.

> The law is not simple. 100 words sentences of law jargon are not simple. Many, many pages of such sentences is the opposite of simple.

The German version of the law is just as simple to read as any newspaper or book you read in German high school, so at least I haven't had an issue before.

Such a thing could provide significantly more useful information, too - I envisage a notification with "This site wants to use a cookie on your computer" at the top, "allow/deny, now/always" buttons and a "What are cookies?" link at the bottom, and a user-friendly breakdown of this particular case in between, things like:

• "only visible to this site" vs "visible to ad.doubleclick.net" etc - maybe including, say, the Organization Name from the cookie domain's SSL cert, at least in the case of cookies set to "Secure" (maybe only if the cert's EV)

• "until you close your browser" vs "for a week" etc - perhaps with a way for the user to force session-only if desired

• possibly some kind of warning about snooping risk if the cookie's not marked secure, or not HTTP-only & 3rd-party scripts are on the page, etc

• for the case of 3rd-party cookies, it'd be possible to list which other sites have used the same cookie in the past

And so forth. The most importantant point being that you could actually trust this information - your browser has no motivation to lie to you about it, but any random site might.

[0] eg, https://i.imgur.com/NcxWz8zh.jpg

The law allows storing session info, config options, etc without prompting. The browser couldn’t reliably test that.

Unless you’d also let login to sites be handled by the browser, akin to Mozilla’s Persona.

Damn, that’d actually be a much nicer web.

Or, to look at it another way... so what if the browser pops up notifications more often than the law requires? Might encourage people to make less use of cookies for functionality that doesn't really need them, which would be no tragedy. And if your site really can't do without them, you could pop up a message explaining the situation & politely asking to be unblocked.

I suppose there'd be a danger of alert fatigue... maybe some heuristic analysis of the cookies themselves would be in order, to at least tentatively classify them as "tracking" vs "other". Eg, Google Analytics & Piwik cookies could be identified pretty reliably.

But that's happening with the current solution as well (not to mention all those crappy sites with their modal popups that teach you to close anything opening asap anyway)

Or maybe they want to persist session information?

Maybe browsers should prompt, instead of each website, but it's too late for that now.

That’s specifically exempt from the cookie law: Any technical cookie – session information, config options, etc – is allowed without any request.

The Cookie law only requires opt-in for tracking. Such as Google Analytics.

I was with you except this line. Data is needed to make better choices and prioritize improvements. How would you like people to collect data? Google Analytics is free, easy, and powerful. Adding the cost of buioding a KPI tracking and reporting later from scratch... simply would be too much for most open source projects.

Take a dozen, or two dozen, users and give them your product, let them use it, and get far more results from that?

You can even do these things for free, especially in open source many of your potential users are willing to do this.

This still doesn't mean we should just shut up and take it for desktop software. What anyone does on its OS shouldn't leave the LAN - same critique stands for recent MS endeavour with Windows 10.

This is a classical attempt to muddy the waters.

That's because this post is about brew. Windows 10 got tons of flak when it pulled this crap as well. "There are worse cases" is not an excuse for a project doing something shitty.

Search HN for "Windows 10" and you'll get plenty of complaints.

No, it is not so what. This is a major problem with Google instead. The fact that a single company can track majority of the web traffic is a huge risk.

But that doesn't change the validity of the proposal that opt-in should be the standard - exceptions from which must have solid reasons. Just making it easier for someone to make money off people is not one of those reasons. Neither is vague "making the product better".

--

[0] - INB4 yes, there are also valid arguments that opt-out organ donations will reduce doctors' willingness to fight for patient's life. Human societies are complicated.

Actually, I've opted out because my next of kin stand to lose quite a lot (the harvesting of organs needs to be done quickly, well within the mourning period of the people I care about the most). The decision to leave sight of my body needs to be theirs, and theirs alone.

If your in the position to donate organs you most likely died in an accident. You likely won't have that rosy picture of your family and friends around your beside. You might not have anyone.

What a waste.

I said the decision should be theirs. I did not say my body couldn't be parted from them, I said it was their decision to do so. I used to be registered as a donor, but because the law has now changed that my donorship overrides the wishes of my loved ones, I have withdrawn it.

And I said they may not be there to give that decision, so that's moot really. Organs like lungs and hearts expire very quickly. Reading comprehension indeed.

> Try a little empathy next time

For the dead person, or the person who misses out on a life saving organ due to the dead person?

It's your body and your choice obviously, but I think saying it's up to my relatives to decide isn't a great reason to be taken off the donor registry. There is plenty of time for them to grieve but only a few hours to take a vital organ. If you want to do something great if you expire unexpectedly then it's up to you, don't put that on your parter/relatives.

For example your wearables get to collect so much biometric info, if that data can be connected to detecting conditions early it would provide a lot of value down the road. At some point we will have the option to collect data about what you ate, what you did, where you went and then how that affected your biometrics, and we can inexpensively collect huge scale DNA samples, etc. all that data if available publicly could really provide insights in to things that are really not practical in limited group studies.

For reasons such as this I think I'm fine if services collect anonymized (unless we solve identity theft and such security concerns) information about me, I'd just want them to make this data free.

Remember; there's no such thing as "anonymized data", there's only "not enough other data to correlate out identities from it".

I am saying is that these benign things are opt-out not because most people wouldn't want to do them if they weigh the prons and cons but because they don't want to put in the effort of doing so and will just be conservative - which is logical from an individual perspective - but will cause us to lose out on opportunities as a whole.

Also this data is getting collected weather you want it or not, even intelligence people are just taping over their webcams as a security measure - the attitude that we must protect every bit of privacy by default will lead to the future where hidden data collection is the only way to access data - people will be making money off it, it won't be available to general public (for eg. public research) and there will be no transparency about it. And if you think the government will protect you - well they are the biggest transgressor here.

So instead of fighting a lost battle with trying to keep absolute privacy why not just make most of that data public and available and focus on protecting the really sensitive stuff.

Because you can't. You cannot build something that protects the really sensitive stuff out of stuff that's leaking data left and right, making it harder and harder to protect the really sensitive stuff.

Yeah, carrier contracts also "disclose" everything, there's a reason why it's called "small print".

It would only take to make it opt-in, instead of opt-out to rectify this.

Homebrew lead maintainer here. This is exactly why we do it. To repeat myself from below: we're chronically understaffed and underfunded.

> Furthermore, now that you know, for brew specifically, will you opt out?

It's worth noting: if everyone who uses a niche piece of software opt-out when it breaks we'll look at our analytics and likely remove it from Homebrew instead of fixing it. This may be unfair but given the amount of work: we need ways to prioritise. Analytics have helped us do that so we can prioritise fixes on things that are critical for many people.

If just 1% of users opt-in to telemetry, you would have more than enough data for a representative sample set.

This is the whole point. You can do the right thing without any loss of data usefulness. So why persist in doing the wrong thing??

The team behind Brew is doing a great job and if analytics can help them do a better job, then be it. Nobody is forcing you to use it and opting out is simple enough.

From initial discussion with Mike, there are two parts that would be needed for a (self hosted) setup:

a) The hosting itself (this is something I can likely help with)

b) Setup and ongoing management of Piwik. This isn't a skill set I have (nor am interested in). However I'm generally thinking the Homebrew Community is big enough to rustle up at least a few people with the right skill set for getting this done (and keeping it done :>).

Trying to get both hosting + Piwik setup/mgmt from the same set of people may be a tall order, so doing them separately is probably more achievable.

As a data point, this kind of approach - sponsored hosting/hw/similar + volunteers to look after Community infra - is used successfully in other projects. PostgreSQL is a good example.

Can't really think of any obvious reasons it wouldn't work for Homebrew too. ;)

Additionally, this (kind) offer is pointing to other organisations that may be able to host the servers and discussing potential solutions to the other options. It's not a slam-dunk by any means.

This is all done in my free time so I don't need an excuse to do or not do any of this.

No, it's not. µblock, µmatrix + clean links.

Not according to its creator https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

No, we don't know. This article wouldn't have hit the front page if it wasn't subtle and user-hostile by default (opt-out).

>Data is being sent to Google everytime you do almost anything in almost all websites, using the same technology. So what?

Brew is not a website, it's a CLI tool. People expect this behavior of websites, not of sysadmin tools. How would you feel if you found out your compiler shipped off a copy of your code to a remote server each time you encountered a compiler error "to improve the compiler" and you had to opt out of this behavior?

>Some of the times it's to make the product better, or better targeted. Some other times it's just for spying on the users.

It's always spying, regardless of the motivation.

>How do we expect open source to become better if everyone is being a crybaby because brew got a history of how often they do brew update?

Somehow open source has functioned all of these years without silently harvesting users' usage data. I don't know how new you are to open source, but this is definitely not the way you do QA for an open source project.

What commands do you run in brew that isn't specific to brew? Whereas, compiling code is a very specific-to-you scenario. If brew fails, it's likely to be caused by brew itself or a package that is part of the repository. If you your compiler runs into an issue, it's not inherent to the compiler necessarily. I'm not a fan of brew at all, and I can't really find the malice here. Either opt out, stop using brew, or accept it. Why are you on OSX if you care that much about your package manager anyways? Ive worked at many companies, and any that let you choose a MacBook will let you opt for a Linux laptop instead (YMMV I guess).

Command line tools do not usually do this at all, particularly FOSS command line tools. This is a very worrying development and reduces my trust in FOSS.

--edit-- to whoever downvoted me, can you explain why?

I love FOSS but I also lovemy privacy. I have come to generally have a default level of trust for popular FOSS projects. Things like this make me question that trust. Why is this wrong?

Agreed.

> reduces my trust in FOSS

Please don't distrust a whole category because of a single tool. Most FOSS tools don't do this, especially if they're "Free Software" as opposed to just being "open-source", since "Free Software" indicates a moral, not just practical stance on software.

I guess I'm not really thinking "distrust them like they actively include malware" just that it looks like I need to at least keep a look out for stuff like this.

I love FOSS. I believe in it, I use it all the time, I've made a few minor contributions here and there too. It's not like I'm saying "OMG FOSS is teh evil!", just that maybe my trust level was calibrated a little high :)

These kinds of complains are fine, I don't think we should stop them.

It's a bit like corruption in politics, it's not going to be solved anytime soon, but complains do raise awareness and prevent abuses. Who know what's going to happen if we stop complaining?

No real security reason? We can test that. The developer who added this feature can easy earn trust in such statement by changing the disclaimer and making themselves liable if information extracted through this mechanism causes any identifiable harm.

If this is a sure bet, no risk, perfectly guarantied to be safe, then such change should be trivial.

not on browsers I control

if you know about it

> There are many more that do the same things without telling you

This makes it right?

> Will you choose to make its progress slower because of no real security reason

Some will, you think it's OK not to give them the choice?

> How do we expect open source to become better

Is opt-in that hard?

I probably would have still say OK but I like to at least be aware. Shame on me.

Really that is all it takes. Everything else just goes against the fundamentals of open source software, which is, respect user rights.

If developers needs an information about how user uses a program, they should ask them to help.

I've worked on products with tens of thousands of users, and the vast majority of those users never communicate.

Worse (in my opinion), the users who communicate most tend to be experts, leading to programs tending to become better for expert users, and worse for beginners / occasional users -- see for example how many linux programs have options you can turn on to make them more user-friendly, but of course as a beginner how do you find them?

On the other hand, not listening to users but analytics leads to dumbed-down inflexible programs that can't get out of their own way for expert users.

If you have "tens of thousands of users" and most of them don't communicate, I'd call that successful. They're satisfied.

And your answer to that is to spy on them unless they read fine-grained details that even the generally expert users on this site missed?

Also maybe they do not say anything because everything works ok for them?

Nor is it a reason to even try tracking with Google Analytics.

In my case, I ensure that the backend server is also FLOSS, that no problematic data is transferred, and so on. All FLOSS, everything verifiable by the users.

But running Google Analytics? Without prompting the user?

Great...

Free software is supposed to do what the user wants, not what its developer wants.

Agreed, but please note that Homebrew is only open-source, it is not "free software"[1].

[1] - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

For websites, there's a standard process for blocking this shit. For desktop applications, there isn't.