Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable

Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by Seirdy on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @11:38AM (#27749991)

How do users know if that's all the data that's submitted? Auditing every program to see exactly what gets sent (and repeating the process for every update) is way too much work; it's safer to just opt-out by default.

Now that I think about it, it's safer to simply not use software that opts users into studies (like telemetry analysis) without informed consent.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by TeMPOraL on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @12:24PM (#27750647)

> How do users know if that's all the data that's submitted?

That's the thing, isn't it? They'll never know. They can't; it takes deep technical knowledge to even be able of conceptualize what data could be sent, and how it could be potentially misused.

Which is to say, it's all a matter of trust. Shipping software with opt-out telemetry (or one you can't disable) isn't a good way to earn that trust.

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Re:Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environmen... by infogulch on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @01:49PM (#27751934)

Even with deep technical knowledge and severely pared down telemetry, PII embedded in side-channel like outlets could be missed. Think a simple stack trace with no data is PII-free? Probably. But are you sure that the stack of functions called doesn't depend on the bytes in your name?

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