GitLab Had Begun Planning To Track Its Users But Quickly Changed Course

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GitLab Had Begun Planning To Track Its Users But Quickly Changed Course

While many fled from GitHub to GitLab following Microsoft acquiring the code hosting service, GitLab has come under a bit of fire of its own with plans they had been working on around telemetry support that would begin tracking its users and potentially sharing the data with third-party firms...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GitLab-Telemetry-Yes-No

[Guest]

I'm assuming this only applied to gitlab.com, and not integrating telemetry into GitLab CE and EE. While having the idea in the first place is bad, especially because people don't like being tracked, the fact that they were able to back down and apologize shows that they seem to care about delivering the best product they can.

[leigh123linux]

Fuck them!, I deleted my account.

[royce]

Make a mistake then own up to it and reverse course. Fair play to them. I do hope they find a way to run non-invasive first party analytics though, as these are essential tools for gathering data for improving application UX.

[blacknova]

The way it was worded before implied, that analytics would be required for all instances but CE. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who is against any analytics intrusive or not running on my own instance of GitLab.

[rabcor]

I'm quite surprised that they actually backed out of this, but I don't trust it for one second.

[ddriver]

I'm quite surprised that they actually backed out of this, but I don't trust it for one second.

Nothing preventing them from running all the user repos through whatever they feel like on their end.

Same old pattern - a service pops up, people commit their data to it, it sells people out to the highest bidder.

All your code are belong to us!

[Guest]

Make a mistake then own up to it and reverse course. Fair play to them. I do hope they find a way to run non-invasive first party analytics though, as these are essential tools for gathering data for improving application UX.

There is no excuse to use third-party analytics. They could simply log user activity and use already existing libre analytics solutions instead. This way you don't need to run cancerous js analytics script that worsens performance of the site, and probably sends your data to a third party that will double dip in it and sell it to make a profit off your data.

[loganj]

so "While many fled from GitHub to GitLab" they thought they catch a big fish and wanted to sell it. i wonder how much money they can make over this type of third-party analytics. i'm guessing they can sell it to more than one group

[Kayden]

The way it was worded before implied, that analytics would be required for all instances but CE. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who is against any analytics intrusive or not running on my own instance of GitLab.

In particular, I suspect most large corporations running EE with code for unreleased/unannounced products would not be fans. :) Honestly, it seems so obvious that most of their paying enterprise customers would be opposed to this that I'm really surprised they made such an obvious blunder.