Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by 542458 on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @08:40AM (#27747669)

Because massive chunks of the population will never turn it on not due to ideological commitment, but simply due to no knowledge that it exists. Furthermore, if we define “tracking” as broadly as “any crash reports and any checking for updates” that effectively means these features will not work, and the open-source maintainers will have a much harder time tracking down bugs and encouraging people to update to less buggy or more secure versions of their software.

Why not simply fork or choose not to install code you don’t like, rather than forcing your beliefs about what does or does not constitute acceptable code on the developers?

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by account42 on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @08:47AM (#27747755)

You are not entitled to crash reports - that applies to open source developers just as to anyone else. If you wan't crash reports, have some kind of wizard or command to submit them and point to that when a crash happens, but you must always gather informed consent before submitting that data.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by beaconstudios on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @08:52AM (#27747810)

I like how games typically handle this; if the application crashes a dialog appears asking if you want to send a crash report, and often tells you what's included in said report.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by marcosdumay on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @10:31AM (#27749137)

On a more CLI oriented design, take a look at Debian's report-bug program. It's completely transparent, and still gathers enough information that most times a one-line description of the bug is enough for anybody to understand everything that happened on your system.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by genezeta on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @09:15AM (#27748077)

Many Windows applications used to do that. Just search for "crash report dialog" images and you'll find many of them.

Firefox does it too. And it keeps a log of past crashes on about:crashes where you can decide which ones to submit.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by jeroenhd on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @10:11AM (#27748830)

Many versions of Android do the same (although the details may differ, that's the beauty and the curse of open source). After crashing a (on some devices, only after a few times), you get a popup that says something like "<app name> appears to stop unexpectedly, would you like to report this to the developer?"

If you click on the details button, you can see almost everything outside of pure hexdumps of RAM.

There's no need for automatic sample submission if you respect your users' privacy.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by elliekelly on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @08:56AM (#27747867)

> but simply due to no knowledge that it exists.

If it’s so important to the project the devs can ask users, educate them, and receive informed consent. There are plenty of ways a dev can force a user’s attention for a few minutes to hear their “pitch” and if the users still don’t want to opt in after hearing the reasons perhaps the reasons aren’t nearly as compelling as the devs believe them to be.

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