Given that, it's probably the case that the only options are to either be fully open source or to make a fully offline mode an option.
In any case, I think the concept for your product is excellent—it's been mind-boggling to me that something along these lines wasn't tackled years ago, so I look forward to your guys' future success, hopefully moving the state of terminal interaction into the modern era.
It's not just that the level of trust is very low. I shouldn't need to place any trust in the developers of my terminal at all. If I can't know for a fact that it's not acting against my interests, then I'll pass. I already have such a big selection of fully open-source terminals available. Why would I even consider taking any king of risk with this one?
My advice here would be to simply make telemetry opt-in during the beta period. I’m typically pretty liberal about opting in to telemetry (particularly when the extent of which is documented), but obviously a lot of your users will not be. Your desire to accelerate your progress seems to conflate with the needs of your target demo, and I think this warrants adjustment.
Look at the recent logging fiasco for an example.
A useful terminal cannot be prevented from contacting remote hosts.
Warp could certainly promise not to include any phone-home functionality in their code, but unless it's open-source and everything is audited, it could easily call the host system's HTTP client and still phone home.
Is this true? This sounds wrong to me but I don't know the inner workings of terminals. The terminal just executes programs and handles pipes it seems. A terminal can be completely walled from the internet, and when you execute something from it, say, curl, then curl has it's own memory space and access layer outside the terminal, and just has it's stdio wired to the terminal.
As I said in my comment, even if you "wall" the terminal off from the internet, if it can make system calls on behalf of the user, it can still access the internet.
If a terminal has sufficient access to the host system to call `curl https://www.google.com` on behalf of the user, then it can call it without any user input.
There is nothing on the host machine that can authenticate system calls coming from the terminal application as "user-initiated" or not. This is similar to the warning that "you can't trust the client"[1].
1. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/105389/dont-tru...
This is a human problem, not a software one. Your terminal is as trustworthy as its creators. It cannot be locked down to prevent telemetry and still be a useful terminal. That was my original point and it is still true.
No one should use a for-profit terminal emulator, especially one created by a VC-backed startup, full stop.
We should make it even more transparent what we collect. You can see it here: https://docs.warp.dev/getting-started/privacy#exhaustive-tel...
Re: big business, we're still pretty small, but it's true that we are trying to build a business around the command-line. I get that's controversial and it's not something that exists and that the terminal is a super-sensitive low level tool.
We will never ever build a business around terminal data, and to be super explicit, we are 100% not collecting any command inputs or outputs.
The business that we want to build is around making a terminal (or a platform for text based apps) that grows because it makes individuals and teams a lot more productive on the command line.
I've there's one thing I've taken away from this ShowHN so far is that there is a lot of well-founded concern about the terminal and user data and that we need to do a better job on this issue.