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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

The maintainers who reply dodge the issue in a way that must be frustrating to the reporter; and makes it seems like they'd probably not accept a PR that modified this behavior. Calling privacy advocates "paranoid" in today's climate is a bit suspect. There's a definite issue here that the Atom team should address - a reasonable user would expect that, after opting out, the app would never phone home, and it does.

Blaming tone is too easy - at this point the Atom team is representing Microsoft, so I'd say the burden is on them to soak up a little snark; especially coming from a user who maybe expects them to behave a bit more like the GitHub of old. Even if they were a small open-source team I would still expect them to directly confront the issue instead of beating around the bush. It's about privacy, and splitting hairs to deny the reporter's reality is a bad look.

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> Calling privacy advocates "paranoid" in today's climate is a bit suspect.

It's an insult. They're comparing people with legitimate concerns backed by evidence and precedent to paranoid schizophrenics. They are implicitly saying that people who value privacy are delusional and mentally ill.

The application clearly states that it sends an opt-out notification anonymously after opt-out. I think they're doing better than most in terms of transparency. Is there room for improvement? Sure. But I don't think attacking people who are already doing pretty well compared to the field is the best use of anyone's time.

This is just picking on an open-source team which already has shown themselves to take user feedback about privacy seriously. If you are so suspect of third parties that any device or application sending any network traffic without previous authorization is of serious concern to you, there's a lot more important and impactful products to voice concern about. Like pretty much any other part of Microsoft.

The "never phone home" UI should make it clear that it will still phone home to check for updates.

But I'm sympathetic to Github here. Having users on unpatched software is a bigger risk to them than not having 100% perfect insulation from sending their IP address to Microsoft.

>Having users on unpatched software is a bigger risk to them than not having 100% perfect insulation from sending their IP address to Microsoft.

That's not a decision for Github to make. Let the user decide. Perhaps by even presenting them with a dialog on first run that informs them then asks them ti decide.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Somewhere out there (prog21 ?) is an article stating that the one in desperate need of electricity (the computing device) is subject to the one in a position to provide it (the user), and I agree with that sentiment.

I'd even like an IETF-standard-like T-shirt that says 'The user's will MUST be obeyed as faithfully as possible unless prevented by unrecoverable circumstances' or something like that.

Click-through EULAs and dialog boxes are another symptom of the 'elite-developer-itis' our industry can sometimes exude.

Users having unpatched software is no risk to GitHub. It's risk to those users.

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