Transparent telemetry for open-source projects
@rsc, if you ever see this, your proposal here means that I will never use any software written in Go ever again, if at all possible.<p>What others have said in this thread about telemetry becoming an &quot;accelerant&quot; will happen. Abuse will happen. Data will be put up for sale. IP&#x27;s will be logged because users can&#x27;t verify that they&#x27;re not.<p>The only thing users can verify is what is sent and to whom. And only if they run packet inspection. Most users don&#x27;t.<p>(Edit: I just realized that users may not even be able to tell who data is sent to because of proxies or the original collector selling the data.)<p>I have no reason to believe your personal motives are anything but pure; however, this capability will not just be in your hands. It will be in the hands of anyone with less-than-pure motives.<p>I applaud your efforts to make telemetry more transparent, but they are destined to fail.<p>When it comes to figuring out how users use software, the only thing to do legwork. Ask your users. Watch them if they&#x27;ll let you do user studies. Pay non-users to use the software for a user study and put them through all situations, including rare ones.<p>This is the same thing we programmers tell the police to do when the police whine about end-to-end encryption: do old-fashioned legwork. Why should we, as programmers, demand that of police when we give ourselves tools to violate the privacy of users in the exact same way that police want?<p>Yes, that&#x27;s right, the <i>exact</i> same way. Telemetry is a backdoor on a private conversation between a user and a machine.<p>Just do the work. I&#x27;m pretty sure Google has the money to do so.<p>You may respond that this is for Open Source developers to get data on their users. Well, if those developers are hobbyists, they don&#x27;t have time to crunch data, and they&#x27;re probably scratching an itch. If they are not hobbyists, they are paid and should do the legwork.<p>There is <i>no</i> excuse for telemetry. Just do the work.