Google Go language goes with opt-in telemetry

The stewards of Google's open source Go programming language (Golang) have reversed course and committed to implementing software telemetry on an opt-in basis rather than turning data collection on by default and requiring developers to opt-out. The opt-out proposal was put forth in early February by Russ Cox, the Golang tech …

[steviebuk]

Never knew this

"The Chocolate Factory has consistently opposed opt-in data collection – you still have to rename your Wi-Fi SSID to opt-out of Google mapping your Wi-Fi access point, for example. And it continues to promote a definition of privacy that skews toward data usage rather than data denial."

People should change it to fuck Google at the end. So they have a list of devices all with fuck Google :)

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Re: Never knew this

I'm genuinely annoyed by this. A lot of wifi routers won't actually let you decide the suffix for 5GHz networks, so you'd have "12345_nomap" and "12345_nomap_5Ghz", meaning you can't opt out even if you wanted to. Really poor behaviour on Google's part, this.

[martinusher]

Re: Never knew this

Its just a string so there's no particular reason why you couldn't use "12345_5GHz_nomap".

(A wireless network is identified by a number that's the same format as (and is in most cases identical to) the access point's MAC address. This number is part of the packet header (along with the destination and source MAC addresses). Its a bit unwieldy for humans so its associated with a user defined text string that's broadcast as part of the access point's beacon packet.)(It would be a really smart idea for programmers to avoid the temptation of ascribing meaning to that string -- appending "nomap" will work but anything else is asking for trouble.)

[mpi]

Re: Never knew this

> Its just a string so there's no particular reason why you couldn't use "12345_5GHz_nomap".

That's true, but alot of people, especially non-techies, own Access Points (usually built-in to DSL/LTE/5G endpoints) that are heavily restricted in their possible settings and simply won't allow one to change the SSID to whatever they want. Sometimes it's not even possible to set the device to a private SSID (a non-broadcasted one).

So they have no way of escaping that data-grab, other than turning off their Network.

[karlkarl]

So those Rust fans as recently as 2019 where honestly telling me that C and C++ are the worst when at the same time all of this telemetry shite was being injected into their binaries?

https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup/pull/1642/files

Clowns.

As for Go. This decision is correct. No successful language can have built in telemetry.

[Adam Azarchs]

Just to be clear, the proposal is for telemetry of the compiler and related tools, not anything affecting the build outputs. And if you read the proposal you will see that the data collection is very carefully designed to be highly resident to fingerprinting and such. Whatever you think of Google as a whole, there are definitely smart people there who do care about privacy. Though, caveats about the possibility they'll get fired and replaced at some point do of course apply.

[mpi]

> Whatever you think of Google as a whole, there are definitely smart people there who do care about privacy.

Yes, and the article explains very well why that's not reassuring enough:

> As one discussion participant put it, "I don't think 'I trust the Go devteam' is a long-term assurance. Google, as diverse a conglomeration of interests and motivations as it might be, is still a faceless megacorporation who could can the whole team at any time, for no reason whatsoever, or even for bad reasons."

[omz13]

> Whatever you think of Google as a whole, there are definitely smart people there who do care about privacy.

But were the smart people the ones coming up with the proposal?

They should have defaulted to opt-in instead of opt-out (and when pushed the “but other people are opt-out” response was somewhat lame). The discussion to persuade them to do opt-in really felt like an uphill battle against a de facto thing they were going to do regardless. Part of it may be cultural because the USA has no concept of privacy compared to the rest of the world, especially the EU. Part of it may also be because nobody ever thinks what could possibly go wrong, or how could this be abused because unintended consequences and the best laid plans of mice and men, etc.