Feature request: disable telemetry in the console UI

[flatsiedatsie]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When you download a new assistant, by default it comes with telemetry enabled in assistant.json:

• analyticsEnabled : true
• heartbeatEnabled: true

Currently I change those to false manually. I've also written some code that will disable this every time a user downloads a new assistant via the add-on.

However, for an organization that champions privacy and ethics, I think it would be fitting if this was also something that could be toggled via the console UI.

Currently, it can be...

• Hard to know that Snips is even doing this. There is no warning.
• Hard to figure out what these options do. E.g. I'm still not sure what the heartbeat does, and I'm not sure what data the Snips telemetry option actually gathers.

What are the use cases of this feature Cases where privacy is a USP, and situations where privacy by design should be applied (e.g. when using Snips to create something for use in the EU). In the EU, as you know, data minimization should be applied. While I understand that Snips would like to know who is using Snips and how it's used, A good design would not expose my end users to this gathering of telemetry by default.

Describe the solution you'd like

• A checkbox in the assistant settings to enable/disable telemetry. I leave it to you if you want to enable this by default.
• Better explanations of what the consequences of enabling these options are, including how it could help you to improve Snips. Then I can make an informed decision.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Manually removing this. But for end-users this is often not an option.
• Programmatically removing it (reading assistant.json file line by line, changing the settings, and saving the file again).

Additional context I've compared Snips to Mycroft, and believe that Snips is much more believable when it comes to be serious about avoiding cloud connections where possible. I will recommend Snips. However, I think this is a small blemish that could easily be fixed.

• It would increase good will in the community of privacy professionals.
• It would make it easier for developers to adhere to privacy by design principles.

[fredszaq]

Hi @flatsiedatsie

These two fields are indeed still shipped in the assistant, they are however not used anymore in the platform.

• analyticsEnabled was used to control the snips-analytics binary. It is now disabled by default (exits on launch) and cannot be enabled (we still ship it to be sure older installs ends up with disabled analytics)
• heartbeatEnabled was used by all the components to send a single ping to the snips servers when used. This feature is disabled in all the components, and the server will send a 404 if you try to acces the url.

We should however change this values to false to prevent any such misunderstanding. And we'll do the necessary changes for the platform not to crash if these are not present (it still looks for the fields event if it doesn't use them at the moment)

[flatsiedatsie]

We should however change this values to false to prevent any such misunderstanding

That would be great. I coded a feature for my project to handle this situation, which I'm glad to hear is no longer an issue. Kudos!

And we'll do the necessary changes for the platform not to crash if these are not present

Sound like a plan!