sfwilliamson

We also rolled back all changes to our Terms of Service and our Privacy policy, and we updated our blog post accordingly: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/10/10/update-free-softwar...

We've heard your concerns and questions. There were many more concerns than we expected. We’re going to process the feedback and rethink our plan. We will not activate product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan. We will make sure to communicate our proposed changes prior to any changes to GitLab.com or self-managed instances, and give sufficient time for people to provide feedback for a new proposal. We'll work in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672

Here's an MR updating our blog post accordingly: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

GitLab employee here.

First of all, my apologies for the confusing messaging to our customer base. This change is only for our .com customers. We have not yet added instrumentation to the self-hosted Enterprise edition versions, and we will not do so until we have a way for self-hosted customers to easily control whether tracking is enabled in their environment. As an example, we currently have a feature called "usage ping" which sends back aggregate usage data, and self-hosted customers have the option to turn it off. We will continue to allow self-hosted customers to control the level of product usage data that is tracked in their environment, or turn it off completely.

We also will not add tracking to the Community Edition, so that is always an option for customers.

I want to reiterate that we are using this data to improve the product experience. Currently we are blind to what is being used in the product, how customers flow through the system, etc. Without this usage data it is very difficult to build a great customer experience.