Closed axb21 closed 2 years ago
kevinslin
commented
2 years ago hey @axb21
i appreciate you taking the time to write this issue. telemetry is a polarizing topic and i understand how having telemetry enabled can be a deal breaker for people.
there's not much I can add beyond what's already written here. i respect your decision to not use software because of your personal principles. i hope you can respect our decision to make software because our own.
axb21
commented
2 years ago Collecting telemetry is not a "principle". Like I said, it's not a tradeoff. You can't trade something you don't/shouldn't control, like a user's data. You have to ask them for it. It'd be like saying you made a tradeoff about blocking the entrance to a person's house. You can't do that, because the entrance isn't yours--you ask them permission, or you face their ire.
The only thing "polarizing" about this topic is the attempts to justify what amounts to exploitation of people's trust. It sucks when software does this, and people know that. Trying to justify the unjustifiable is offensive, and people know that too.
You should rethink, and turn it off, or make it opt-in. There's really no middle ground if you care about ethics.
RLC92
commented
11 months ago Pulling up this ticket because the "Disable Telemetry" command has repeatedly not worked and resulted in data leaking visibly.
I will cease using and recommending dendron, until an Opt-In, developer-friendly, user-friendly, human-friendly approach to data collection is taken.
The lack of an ability to disable the feature trivially permanently system wide and the fact that existing commands don't work/aren't respected indicate a lack of respect for the users.
A simple environment variable "ENABLE_DENDRON_TELEMETRY" should be all that's needed and I suggest anyone with an understanding of ethics and human decency simply use better software.
Having telemetry turned on by default is not acceptable, in my view, given how much it violates privacy. Telemetry should be opt-in at best, and the user should be warned about what data will be sent where. The documentation details what is being collected, but it does not detail where the data will be sent, at what frequency it will be sent, etc.
This explanation of why opt-out is used by default is, frankly, illogical. You can't make a trade-off with a user's privacy, because by definition privacy is under the user's control, not the application developers. At best you can make a request of the user to share information with you, and thank them for doing so--in other words, opt-in should be the default. Anything less is a fake form of consent gathering that is, especially given human default bias, privacy eroding.
It's disappointing to see--the kind of stuff you expect from bad actors like Facebook--and I definitely will not be using Dendron until/unless this policy is changed.