I think that the author has kind of a Stockholm syndrome.
"Users are liars, so let's spy them directly to know what we want to know".
It is mind blowing how, as an user/the target, you can support that.
Nothing is really anonymous and your anonymous data can say a lot about you.
Telemetry coming from this IP, so company x is using go. A pattern of data coming every 2 days, so their build nodes rebuild every 2 days. That kind of build pattern is there, so they are using the xxx crypto library...
And when they say, let's trust Google, I would propose to Google to accept the opposite:
Now they will transmit to the public telemetry of their internal systems: how many users, what do they do, how many users they block, for what reason, how many build nodes they have, how many commits, how long the go team is spending looking at telemetry reports, which website are the more visited by Google employees,...
And let's see if they will accept. It's for the good of the world, why they would refuse?
I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it. Is this the common attitude inside Google or Silicon Valley proper these days?
Privacy used to be kind of sacrosanct in the industry. What happened?
I guess when surveillance driven advertising pays all the bills it has an extreme warping effect on everyone’s mentality. It’s hard to care about privacy when violating it is how you get paid.
I’m increasingly wondering if we might vastly improve our society by banning or taxing the hell out of all advertising. It’s an industry that makes the world a worse place in deep and pervasive ways that go much further than just making everything ugly and obnoxious. The industry pushes a toxic relationship between people and businesses at every level.
> I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it.
It is gross. It's also very ignorant. The author's argument basically boils down to, "I can't see an obvious major downside to this proposal, so that must mean there isn't one nor will there ever be one". How many times to we have to get burned by large companies invading our privacy and after promising not to before we wise up?
Look, I hate large corps too but this paranoia hinders open source's ability to self-cooperate.
> Telemetry coming from this IP, so company x is using go. A pattern of data coming every 2 days, so their build nodes rebuild every 2 days.
Not true. Even if Google lied about collecting IPs, the data would be sent only every ~ year with aggregated counts so no real time usage data. And even if one could see the patterns from the data, everyone will be able to, not just Google.
Let's not trust Google. But let's not shoot ourselves in the foot by refusing any automated cooperation.
Additionally, majority of distros use package managers, so if any of the major promises of the upstream would be broken, distro packages could patch it out. This isn't forced, there are several points where anyone can stop the telemetry.
"Users are liars, so let's spy them directly to know what we want to know".
It is mind blowing how, as an user/the target, you can support that.
Nothing is really anonymous and your anonymous data can say a lot about you.
Telemetry coming from this IP, so company x is using go. A pattern of data coming every 2 days, so their build nodes rebuild every 2 days. That kind of build pattern is there, so they are using the xxx crypto library...
And when they say, let's trust Google, I would propose to Google to accept the opposite:
Now they will transmit to the public telemetry of their internal systems: how many users, what do they do, how many users they block, for what reason, how many build nodes they have, how many commits, how long the go team is spending looking at telemetry reports, which website are the more visited by Google employees,...
And let's see if they will accept. It's for the good of the world, why they would refuse?