Telemetry

[ErikBjare]

I'd love me some opt-in telemetry sometime in the future.

Stuff like:

• Version
• Operating system
• Date of installation/first run

Giving us aggregate statistics like:

• Daily/weekly/monthly active installs
• Total install count
• Churn rate

We need to consider the possible privacy implications of collecting telemetry as well. I guess we'd need to make it opt-in but that'd leave us with some blind spots I'd rather not have, at least not this early in the projects life.

Telemetry might share some infrastructure with #114 (update checking).

An article regarding telemetry in open source software: https://alexgaynor.net/2015/sep/03/telemetry-for-open-source/

[ErikBjare]

Perhaps you've thought more about open source telemetry since your article @alex?

Edit 11/30: Emailed Alex to see if he has any thoughts on the matter.

[alex]

ActivityWatch is an application people run, not a library right?

My personal view is that for applications, it's ok to send non-personally-identifiable information in opt-out (aka on by default) telemetry.

If it's a library the state of the art is much less clear.

[johan-bjareholt]

@alex It is a set of programs (multiple aw-clients reporting to the aw-server) built upon a few shared libraries (aw-client, aw-core).

In my opinion it would make the most sense to put the telemetry reporting in aw-server. The aw-server could also report info about which clients has connected to it, so we can see for example how many % of our users use the aw-watcher-web client which is optional.

[ErikBjare]

@alex Ah, alright. Thanks for the response :)

Do you know if there are any good systems/tools to collect telemetry for an open source project?

@johan-bjareholt I agree that aw-server is probably the best place. And yeah, which watchers are used would be nice to collect.

[alex]

Sorry, I don't know. Firefox (where I work) is all custom stuff for telemetry.

[1000i100]

I'm very privacy concerned and i like opt-in far more than opt-out.

When you will have an install wizard, add a screen to ask user if it's ok to collect telemetry is the way to make me happy about it.

[ErikBjare]

Found Matomo, looks promising: https://matomo.org/

[sandebert]

I'm not entirely sure Fathom would fit the requirements, but I'll just mention it here as they focus a lot on privacy. https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

[ErikBjare]

@sandebert Looks interesting, but we need something to send custom data/events (i.e. telemetry). Fathom seems to only focus on website analytics (which we don't really care about at all).

[sandebert]

@ErikBjare Well, that seems to be the next big thing for them to implement: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/61

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.