It would certainly be better if this had been opt-in in the first place. It’s sneaky and destroys the good will of your users if you add tracking and the only way you find out is by seeing your Layer 7 firewall asking you about HTTP requests to analytics.api.* and so on.
It’s no wonder that cookie consent banners make the reject all so hard to find. If it were the easiest choice, I bet you most of the users would just press it! Collecting my private data and having me read pages of privacy policy is yuck.
There are a bunch of firewalls that ask you to allow individual requests, that helps you discover what on your machine is contacting which server. You can also use Qubes and just deny networking to everything except specific VMs running specific apps.
I am surprised to see a post from this month linked there on the Debian wiki discussing future plans to add telemetry to Go (https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-intro)
The author in there tries very hard to convince the reader that this is necessary and that the way Go would do it protects your privacy. To me it’s never been about what information they collect or what the motivation is.
The fact that apps and tools repeatedly introduce a) sudden and b) non-reversible (unless you fork) changes to their software. Heck, as far as I can tell Netlify CLI even sends a ping when you opt out, that you have opted out.
My personal gripe lies in the coerciveness of it. Yes, I can always use another tool, but say that to someone who built their whole workflow and platform on something that suddenly decides to alienate their users.
Again, yes, it’s open source, so why not fork? And forks do happen, see Audacity. But bit by bit, our confidence in tools we use to stay productive erodes. What if their analytics servers go down? Will the tool start to fail? (A surprising amount of websites break when you disallow Google Tag Manager). Will the tool be slowed down? Will it have bugs introduced by tracking?
The aw-shucks mentality about including invasive tracking is hilarious.
Even more so in sensitive environments, where tools that you depend on doing unexpected network calls can make some people really nervous.
Don’t alienate your users should be one of the core values of any software, and even more so when your users use it in a professional capacity.
It would certainly be better if this had been opt-in in the first place. It’s sneaky and destroys the good will of your users if you add tracking and the only way you find out is by seeing your Layer 7 firewall asking you about HTTP requests to analytics.api.* and so on.
It’s no wonder that cookie consent banners make the reject all so hard to find. If it were the easiest choice, I bet you most of the users would just press it! Collecting my private data and having me read pages of privacy policy is yuck.