New “ Pkg & Storage protocols ” and an accompanying centralized service to host packages have been merged and are present in Julia v1.5.0-rc1. The new Pkg sends telemetry consisting of a user-specific UUID and other information to the server, where it is used to count the number of users and other sta…

Thanks for the productive discussion and suggestions, everyone. We’ve tossed this around a bit among the Julia committers group, and I think it’s clear that all this requires some additional design work, so here’s how we’re going to proceed: For 1.5, we will remove the UUID and all other stateful…

Stefan, all, Thanks for the thoughtful responses. If nothing else, the telemetry is an interesting experiment; I look forward to the results.

Will there be any public information about registered packages popularity in numbers of installs? Or will that information be delivered to package authors somehow?

As a fellow “privacy nut”, it is not about the threat model, whether the invasion is minimal, or telemetry beneficial for the community, but rather about how consent is extracted from the user. To me, any opt-out telemetry is inherently non-consensual as it violates the expectations I have for FOSS …

My view on this is simple: I think this should be opt-in, not opt-out. I don’t mind nudges to opt-in, but I generally feel that the “right” thing to do with telemetry is to never do it unless a user opted in. In my view a desire to count users doesn’t trump that principle.

[image] davidanthoff: In my view a desire to count users doesn’t trump that principle. I think the view when this was made is that since the info is less than that given when you make the HTTP request to get the package, it’s hard to believe that users would care more about the Julia communit…

I also think that reactions to telemetry practices are often reversed to what they should be: people remaining passive when they become aware that their privacy rights have been silently abused, and then claiming for more control when they encounter some service that does better and provide users wi…

I don’t think so. There is also telemetry on VSCode and the Julia extension and I opted in. @davidanthoff can propably say something about the usefullness of the data they gain and perhaps on how many people opt-in?

That is different, because in VSCode the telemetry is used to send crash reports, if I remember correctly. Edit: As it turns out there are two options, one for crash-reports and one for telemetry. It is sufficient to just get a subsample of all crash reports. For Julia the attractiveness lies in k…

To compare how many people would opt-in it still could give an answer. Sure a single crash report is still good information, but just a single opt-in for pkg usage would be useless. I just think that enough people would opt-in. But if the VSCode opt-in is very low I am probably wrong.

Pkg.jl telemetry should be opt-in

Internals & Design

StefanKarpinski July 2, 2020, 6:05am 66

If it’s opt-in, I can guarantee that approximately 0% of people will opt in, so it would be approximately 0% useful.

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Pkg.jl telemetry should be opt-in

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