Go Telemetry

There has been a big debate recently over the proposal to add telemetry to Go. 

It started with Russ Cox's multi-part Transparent Telemetry

I read the proposal and it seemed well thought out. I could understand the need to get more information about how Go was actually being used. Collecting a few anonymous counters seemed relatively benign compared to the "big" (i.e. invasive) data being collected by seemingly everyone these days.

Naively, I didn't foresee the big push back in the discussion at telemetry in the Go toolchain which was eventually locked after 506 comments. (518 thumbs down to 118 thumbs up)

I must admit I have a few qualms myself because it's Google. Go is it's own team, and I would say they have a good track record, but it's still Google paying their salaries and running their servers.

One point I missed until reading the discussion was that they would "temporarily" collect traffic logs with IP addresses. Supposedly this data would just be discarded, but how long until someone at Google decides they could "use" this data?

I think part of the knee jerk reaction was because it's a compiler. That seems wrong somehow. It's a bit reminiscent of the Ken Thompson hack. We may not like it, but these days we accept that Facebook and Apple etc. are going to track us. VS Code is one of the most popular editors, and it sends large amounts of telemetry. (I keep meaning to switch to VSCodium) I used to always opt in to sending telemetry because I wanted to help the developers. Nowadays I opt out of everything I can because it seems that most of it is just spying.

I don't have a lot to add to the debate. But I do have an idea/proposal that might help. How about if the telemetry was collected and published by a third party, someone with a vested interest in not abusing it. Perhaps someone like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The proposal was already saying the data would be public. The Go team could access it from the public source just like anyone else. The Go team would still control the actual telemetry code, but since they wouldn't be collecting the data, it would be pointless to "sneak in" extra information.

It's a bit sad that it's almost impossible to collect legitimate data because so many big companies have abused data collection.