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!
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]
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.
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