CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@josepvives @nuclearplayer Yeah. I can see that some random anecdote from a Microsoft employee is not any kind of assurance. It is frustrating from my perspective because we have to jump through hoops to get any kind of useful data to be "data driven" in our product work but from the outside world we are perceived to be partying on everyone's private data. More transparency would be good for everyone.

@nuclearplayer @dalias the "legitimate interests" GDPR clause for pseudonymous information does seem to make this a grey area, but IANAL and I am not trying to make a judgement on what GitHub did. I'm trying to learn about the objections. I understand the desire for consent but we can see from the "accept cookie" mess that users can just be coerced to consent via fatigue. I wish we had a standardized opt-out mechanism like DNT tried to do.

@josepvives @nuclearplayer Sure it is technically a simple problem. But there are many processes in place that prevent that from happening. Accessing customer content is very tightly controlled. Privacy is something I care about and it is one of the reasons I chose to work at Microsoft rather one of the other big tech companies that do not have the same guardrails in place.

@_aD @w I don't think anyone feels entitled. I think the product owners want to provide the best experience for their users and knowing how the product is used helps. For tools that primarily are clients for a backend service, then the service will know whenever a service call is made. I'm trying to fully understand the objection to capturing some additional usage information that doesn't make a service call. Is it the "slippery slope " problem?

@nuclearplayer And as a Microsoft employee, my experience has been that we are extremely careful about not logging any information that directly identifies users and any customer created content. It isn't lip service to privacy. I've seen projects delayed while we scrub logs because a developer accidentally logged the name of some artifact that they should not have.

@nuclearplayer I would think the important thing is what data is being collected, not the the fact that any data is being collected. If that remote site is collecting end user identifiable information, that should be as big a problem as if a local tool is doing it. What is good about a "source-open" collecting the telemetry is that you can see and verify what is being collected. You can't with a remote service.

@nuclearplayer When you call an API or make a git request to some remote repo, there are going to be logs of that activity on that remote site. We acknowledge that site owners need some visibility into what is happening on their service. However, when it comes to code that is downloaded and executed on a local machine there seems to be an expectation that the code owners no longer have any rights to see how that code is executing. Help me understand why the rules are different.

@nuclearplayer I'm going to put on my lead lined suit here and ask a question because I genuinely want to learn. This issue comes up time and time again. The GitHub CLI telemetry provides product owners with information about how their product is used. You can see what it captures here https://cli.github.com/telemetry It is pseudonymous data. There is no user identifying data there. So yes the telemetry is spying on what the app is doing, but not on which user is doing it.