by m90 on 2/26/23, 11:00 AM with 86 comments
by yalue on 2/26/23, 1:50 PM
by greatgib on 2/26/23, 2:03 PM
"Users are liars, so let's spy them directly to know what we want to know".
It is mind blowing how, as an user/the target, you can support that.
Nothing is really anonymous and your anonymous data can say a lot about you.
Telemetry coming from this IP, so company x is using go. A pattern of data coming every 2 days, so their build nodes rebuild every 2 days. That kind of build pattern is there, so they are using the xxx crypto library...
And when they say, let's trust Google, I would propose to Google to accept the opposite:
Now they will transmit to the public telemetry of their internal systems: how many users, what do they do, how many users they block, for what reason, how many build nodes they have, how many commits, how long the go team is spending looking at telemetry reports, which website are the more visited by Google employees,...
And let's see if they will accept. It's for the good of the world, why they would refuse?
by iforgotpassword on 2/26/23, 12:46 PM
> Without knowing what ports of Go are used, the Go team can’t make sure that the right time is spent on maintaining those ports.
Am I being overly pragmatic if not selfish for thinking this is absolutely fine? If you use a free tool behind closed doors to make money and don't want to opt-in to telemetry, then I couldn't care less if the go team doesn't make go work better for your use case. Meanwhile I'm developing my open source project with telemetry turned on, ?????, PROFIT.
by groestl on 2/26/23, 1:45 PM
People really need to accept that they can't and shouldn't have full introspection into everything they're ever interested in. Even if it's a thing they care about (like their own homepage or programming language). Sure it's nice to get feedback. Sure it's nice to know that somebody uses it. But putting a tracker on everything with the argument of "will help me provide a better service", forgoing informed consent.. It's wrong when it's done on an institutional level, whether it's companies or the goverment, and it's wrong when individuals do that.
by spicyusername on 2/26/23, 1:40 PM
> Unfortunately, the proposal came from a Google employee. Google has a reputation of taking user data and feeding it into piles of linear algebra in order to skew its search results to match your existing biases or whatever the hell else people do with linear algebra.
Right. We live in an age now where gigantic, powerful, organizations are ruining everything to privilege a fantastically small few. They have consistently shown a complete lack of any moral compass and a willingness to do absolutely anything necessary to increase their power or continue to enrich themselves.If we lived in any other age, people might tolerate this, but we don't, and therefore everyone is well within their right to mutiny, regardless of how interesting a technical solution this is.
by pjc50 on 2/26/23, 1:43 PM
There's also a philosophical problem in going too deep into "customers don't know what they want" and A/B testing everything to death: you end up using it as a substitute for dialogue. Ultimately customers are making conscious decisions. You have to make the case rather than assert that it's "better" from behind your metrics dashboard.
by speedgoose on 2/26/23, 1:49 PM
The consensus was that opt-in was the best solution, and thankfully Google went with the best solution.
by zajio1am on 2/26/23, 1:52 PM
Not really. People hate opt-out telemetry regardless of who runs it.
by unxdfa on 2/26/23, 2:00 PM
by tacker2000 on 2/26/23, 2:52 PM
by hedora on 2/26/23, 3:39 PM
So, they don’t test go in CI on clean Mac OS installs? If this sort of issue is the rationale for the telemetry system, it sounds like they’re trying for a older, slightly-less-evil Microsoft approach where you fire QA, and just treat user machines as your test environment.
by StreetChief on 2/26/23, 2:37 PM
by waweic on 2/26/23, 2:39 PM
"Telemetry shows people aren't using this (privacy / internet freedom related) feature, so we can just remove it"
by Scubabear68 on 2/26/23, 3:11 PM
If the Go team wants to see what features are used, go audit open source Go code.
Since Go is also a Google thing, they could likely audit the presumably large sums of Google Go.
Yes, you will miss unknowable amounts of code this way. Who cares?
by patchymcnoodles on 2/27/23, 7:45 AM
Just trying to add this telemetry with opt-out in the first place shown one thing: They don't know their audience. Because if they would, if someone would have come up with that idea, everybody in the team should have screamed: "No, hell no!". You don't have the trust of your users.
I get it, getting trust back is much more effort than collecting more data (even if it's with good intent). But hey, the industry put itself into this.
by aatd86 on 2/26/23, 1:40 PM
Even better if the go tool were to have a `go update` with a `telemetry-off` flag or something. (and possibly a prompt to remind people otherwise they will complain again)
Problem solved.
by kardianos on 2/26/23, 2:12 PM
Knowing the goal allowed rsc to make this judgement.
by zaphar on 2/26/23, 2:32 PM
by fortyseven on 2/26/23, 2:20 PM
by anon23432343 on 2/26/23, 2:58 PM
by croes on 2/26/23, 4:59 PM
by Patrickmi on 2/26/23, 6:02 PM