export ALLOW_TRACKING=telemetry,crash_dumps
and the absence of such a setting means “fuck off, don’t spy on me”. It’s not my responsibility to turn off apps wanting to track me. It’s their responsibility to get me to authorize their specific flavor of tracking.And they do by burying it in the user agreement you probably agreed to.
Like it or not, it is your responsibility. I agree it shouldn’t be, but let’s be realistic.
They didn't opt out of my data, after all.
Unfortunately big corporations can always find away to make regulators see no problem.
This is called opt out.
Can someone expound on what they see as a problem?
In addition to the other response: crash dumps are difficult to anonymize, both because useful crash dumps include something like a minidump (or some other small alternative to a core file), and because even without that, any random information from a backtrace may be sensitive (e.g. a URL).
There's nothing wrong with saving a crash dump and giving the user control of whether to submit a bug report.
Your IP during connection exposes your rough location.
Crash logs rarely are completely anonymized so both together can additionally serve as a way to re-identify the user.
The only way to properly transmit telemetry data would be Tor. And no, even then I don’t want my tools to report back my use. It’s simply not required, and data minimization is part of my set of ethics, and I’m happy that EU/GDPR sees it the same way. Not all data that you think is worth something to you is morally right to collect. You send data somewhere, even just to check for updates - ask me first. I do not want my hammer to report back how many nails I hammered in. I don’t want my software to reach out to the world without my consent.
Users should never be opted in through usage alone of free or paid-for tooling to supply information that isn't part of the function of the tool. Where that is required for a service or product, you should opt-in explicitly, not implicitly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200613155957/https://consoledo...
I abandoned the project. Opting out of telemetry tells developers that opting us in automatically without consent is OK. It’s not.
Spyware is spyware even if it has an off switch.
Patch it out. Fork it. Don’t use spyware. Name and shame developers that accept pay checks to build spyware for corporations. Make it an economically bad choice to accept such jobs by poisoning the google results for the names of people who do this. Make them ashamed.
The one thing you DON’T want to do is validate their unethical model by opting out when you never opted in.
We kind of need ublock origin on the operating system level - even more so as the new laws mandate age sniffing of everyone, tied to usage and access to the www (see the concomitant fight against VPN; that is the long road here, the "but but but the children!" is the lie, the cake, the carrot on the stick).
Ultimately one could ask "but the do not track thing is harmless" - the issue still is that I don't agree that my browser should betray me. Naturally since Google controls most browsers, can we trust Google? But, even aside from Google, can we trust other browsers? We need more diversity here again, but also more quality on every level. I consider the do_not_track as actually a you_will_be_marked and thus tracked.