Filippo Valsorda :go:
Very excited to see Russ Cox's transparent telemetry proposal. It has a few fundamental properties that make it very different from current alternatives, and I think it makes a good model for open-source projects.
It's simple enough to get an intuition for its privacy profile, and powerful enough to get important signals.
Adrian Cochrane
@filippo While I'm not a fan of any analytics (and I don't think its a good way to approach developing a programming language), I get that its how many devs are accustomed to making decisions. Even if most opensource projects don't feel a need for it.
I think this particular analytics proposal is unusually excellent, though I'm aware of some statistical privacy techniques I'd want to see incorporated. Client-side differential privacy, & discard outliers.
1/2
Filippo Valsorda :go:
I've read a lot of the feedback to the transparent telemetry proposal over the past 24h, and I'm disappointed.
This is a large unconventional design, there are a lot of tradeoffs worth discussing and details to explore. When Russ showed it to me I made at least a dozen suggestions and many got implemented.
Instead: all opt-out telemetry is unethical; Google is evil; this is not needed. No one even argued why publishing any of *this* data could be a problem.
Reminds me of Searchtodon feedback.
Filippo Valsorda :go:
It's sad to see a lot of pushback to this proposal come in the form of "clever" quips about Google.
@arp242@github.com has a good take on Go vs Google, which is something I've always wanted to talk about but always assumed would not be well received coming from me.
Having a broken mental model of the "other side" doesn't help anyone's cause. It just leads to talking past each other.
https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409#discussioncomment-4909183
Adrian Cochrane
@filippo But no its not because of the Google association, we freesoftware peeps shout this down wherever we see it.
Personally I think we should get ahead of the next time this analytics controversy inevitably crops up & have an acceptable service we can offer them. We can go very far towards minimizing the concerns! But such a service would be barely get used, since we're accustomed to doing without.
P.S. I'm not a Go developer, I have very general stakeholder interests.
see shy jo
@alcinnz I agree, this is something worth getting in front of.
In debian development I very often found myself using popularity-contest to drive some kinds of decisions. Always having to factor in that it's off by default and we don't know what percentage or kinds of users choose to enable it, but that does not prevent it from being useful.
brennen
@joeyh @alcinnz the thing about popcon is it's limited in scope, i know what the data is for, and i have a degree of confidence that users of the project would flip shit if it became opt out. i can think of almost nothing else that meets these criteria and i'm leery of the thin end of the wedge here. some slopes really are pretty slippery.
Adrian Cochrane
@brennen @joeyh I wouldn't complain if on-startup some apps inobtrusively asked, saying here's a link to the data we have collective & here's how extremely careful we're being regarding privacy...
But I draw a line against anything being opt-out!
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