I find the anti-telemetry attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them. Of course you should have the right to have that data deleted, but that's different from saying it should never be collected at all.
Also, given that nearly all websites are using something like Google Analytics or similar (or several of these at once), the reaction and vitriol here just seems weirdly disproportionate.
> I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right?
They know what products are selling. They don't necessarily know what I personally am buying.
The point of those loyalty program cards is to associate purchasing habits with repeat customers. Those cards, you may note, are opt-in. To belabor the analogy, this was the equivalent of my grocery store putting cameras all over the building and offering me a mask if I wanted to opt out of the user monitoring program.
"Everyone else is doing it" is a pretty bad reason when many of your clients chose to do business with you at least in part because you are not doing it.
> They know what products are selling. They don't necessarily know what I personally am buying.
The vast majority of people use credit cards, which would allow them to track you. If you want to be more anonymous, you can use cash, just like you could install a blocker extension if you want to be more anonymous in the browser.
> To belabor the analogy, this was the equivalent of my grocery store putting cameras all over the building and offering me a mask if I wanted to opt out of the user monitoring program.
Indeed, my local grocery store added cameras all over recently, and apparently many of them use bluetooth trackers. I don't even think they offer masks, though I've never asked.
> "Everyone else is doing it" is a pretty bad reason when many of your clients chose to do business with you at least in part because you are not doing it.
Did gitlab pitch themselves as a privacy-centric git host? I thought their main selling point used to be that they had unlimited private repos. I could be wrong though, I haven't followed them much.
Web tracking is different in that it's ongoing tracking of behaviour. When I buy something from a shop, that's the end of their knowledge: the shop has no idea what I use it for.
When you make non-cash purchases in a shop they sell your purchase data to an aggregator who adds it into their profile of you and derives demographic classifications from that.
Single woman driving a Subaru? Your odds of being lesbian go up a few points. We'll target you for a certain form of advertising.
This has been going on for decades. Before the web ever existed.
Hmm, that must be where the breakdown is. It seems like you view just the transaction as your interaction with Gitlab, but to me if I'm on Gitlab, I'm still "in the shop" so to speak. So to me it's more like sitting in a coffee shop than going to the grocery store.
One of the big issues people had with the Gitlab proposal was that it was going to use 3rd party trackers, so Gitlab wouldn't have full control over your data. Some people were commenting that if the analytics data never left Gitlab, they wouldn't have an issue with it. They were also going to block access to your account until you accepted the tracking.
Following the shopping analogy, it'd be like they let you in the store, but they won't let you leave with your purchase until you fill out a survey by a 3rd party company.
> Of course you should have the right to have that data deleted, but that's different from saying it should never be collected at all.
Err...do you have that right? The whole concept of a "right to be forgotten" is a relatively new thing that generally has not been observed in the past.
Like, if I want the library to erase all records of me checking out books, they probably just aren't going to do it, and I don't see how I have a right to force them to. I willingly gave them my information and used the books there.
>Like, if I want the library to erase all records of me checking out books, they probably just aren't going to do it, and I don't see how I have a right to force them to.
They will. You do.
>I willingly gave them my information and used the books there.
I'm hostile towards both on-line and meatspace telemetry alike. It's just it's much harder to opt out from the latter. When a store I frequent decides to be total assholes and install customer-tracking cameras, I can't even tell (and unfortunately, there's no legal requirement to inform about it; I hope it'll change in the future). And even if I could, like most people, I'm rather price-sensitive when bulk shopping. On-line, I can at least try to defeat most telemetry with content blockers and network filters.
> Of course you should have the right to have that data deleted, but that's different from saying it should never be collected at all.
Anything that GDPR forces to be opt-in (like this telemetry here) is essentially data that shouldn't be collected in the first place.
> Also, given that nearly all websites are using something like Google Analytics or similar (or several of these at once), the reaction and vitriol here just seems weirdly disproportionate.
There were couple compounding issues here, not the least of which was them wanting to deploy telemetry on self-hosted instances. On Gitlab.com, they can deploy analytics scripts to their heart's content; that's just being disrespectful. But self-hosting is something one does in big part to control the data flow, and pushing telemetry onto that kind of defeats the point (it's a real compliance issue for a lot of companies).
As others have said, just because many other people do something, doesn't mean it's good and you should do it too.
Also, given that nearly all websites are using something like Google Analytics or similar (or several of these at once), the reaction and vitriol here just seems weirdly disproportionate.