Pkg.jl telemetry should be opt-in

[chrisvwx]

@odow

The first question JuMP gets asked when applying for funding/awards/etc is how many users we have. Here is a verbatim quote from an email I received today, which asked for “substantiated estimates of the number of installations of a software package.” Should I reply “No idea. Somewhere between 1k and 100k.”?

I don’t dispute the utility of knowing how many users Julia or JuMP has. It may also be useful to know how often JuMP is used or included! Why not have Julia count how often each method is used and send a daily report to the package server? (Edit: to be clear, I’m not in favor of this )

What do you think of HyperLogLog tracking, which doesn’t require sending a UUID?

@Oscar_Smith

Note that the uuid you are talking about isn’t like a Google advertising ID. It isn’t linked with any personal identifying information

No one is claiming that there is any personally identifying information tied to the UUID at present; I’m sure that all the people doing in-browser tracking claimed the same to start with. Even so, what happens when some other package decides to require an email for use, and ties that to the UUID. Or there is a data breach?