The insinuation that all comments opposing the telemetry are hidden is bullshit, as a simple check will confirm: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409
There were definitely comments that got quite heated and probably fell outside good discourse practices, largely because people are very passionate about privacy and also tend to get very upset when they feel betrayed.
CoCs are always protecting the inner circle and their opinions. In the early days of open source, flame wars were considered a legitimate way for voicing opinions. Now, in corporate controlled "open" source, the dominance hierarchy must be protected.
Quite true. Especially in the worksplace where RFC/design meetings are only done to validate what has already been decided.
> CoCs are always protecting the inner circle and their opinions
CoC are 99% not doing that. Of course people can abuse it but I don't see it in practice most of the time. It's just that the abuse/drama gets more attention.
> In the early days of open source, flame wars were considered a legitimate way for voicing opinions
Flame wars have always been discouraged. As soon as one starts, mods usually step in and shut it down.
> Now, in corporate controlled "open" source, the dominance hierarchy must be protected.
Yes, very few corporate-backed open source projects are truly open to collaboration, especially when it changes the feature set. If you want to submit bug reports, help users or a PR for a tiny bug, that's all good.
In their defense, the employees of those companies do the most work so they get to decide. But they do benefit enormously from having the code open (something they very often forget).
Similarly, codes of conduct are set by many groups as a way to be welcoming, letting prospective participants know that they’re not going to get flamed or hit on for trying to participate. Yes, some corporations might use moderation for ulterior reasons but that happens anyway – it’s like arguing that we shouldn’t have cars because people will use them to commit crime.
Chairman Mao instituted the Hundred Flowers Campaign purportedly as a way to solicit community participation in building China's new communist society. The CCP assured everybody, hey, we're totally open to criticism, feel free to be open and honest, we could use your ideas for how to improve.
The reality was made clear in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which critics of Mao's plan or regime were put on a list of those to be arrested as "rightists" and imprisoned or killed.
We're supposed to be adults, not 13 year olds. I'm not perfect either and a jerk at times – most people are – and that's okay, but I'm not making excuses for it. Have some standards.
Most of the hidden comments were hugely disrespectful and provided no argument or anything of value. If you start comparing opt-out telemetry to rape then you're simply a jerk (yes, really: https://i.imgur.com/eLVs9ev.png) I don't care about "yeah but people have strong feelings". I'm tired of excuses for jerkery; I find this enabling of it even more egregious than the jerkery itself. I have strong feelings about a lot of things, but I also manage to keep them in check most of the time on account of being an adult with some standards. Nowhere is this as easy as in online discussions, because you can literally step away from the computer at any time and come back to it an hour or day later.
Obviously, Google's data hunger is worlds less harmful than sexual assault, but I think the difference in how consent is treated is actually relevant for the discussion.
When it comes to sex, it has taken many decades (or even centuries) of hard work, but at this point society is finally starting to get the message across: you don't have consent if it's not given explicitly. Society is still in the process of getting everyone on the same page here (sadly) but progress is being made.
While compiler data collection isn't as important, the idea that consent means "you haven't tried saying no enough" is completely absurd. This means is no good comparison for consent because every comparison where a normal person deals with consent will make the suggestion opt-out seem horrible. Most actions happening to a person without consent are or should be illegal, with perhaps lawful arrests and the judicial system being the exception.
If we, as a society, really do value explicit consent, we shouldn't mix and match what is and isn't consent based on what serves us. Consent is important in software too, even if some companies or developers don't see it that way.
Google devs especially should know this. People I know have felt a real sense of violation when they found out how intensely Google tracks its users. I've seen people get creeped and grossed out by their phones because they were asked to review a restaurant they were near, realising that Google knew exactly where they were and how long, and that the tracking had gone on for much longer before that. I, myself, felt a little violated when I found out how much data Microsoft's dotnet tool has been sending out after getting "consent" during an automated install and first use, despite knowing the data can't track me down as a person.
The impact may be incomparable, but developers seem to severely underestimate the emotional impact their blatant disregard for other people's privacy can really have just because they don't feel the same way. Perhaps another way the comparison is more apt than it would seem at first glance.
You can write long philosophical stories about it and none of that matters anyway. The accusation is pretty clear, and it should be pretty obvious to everyone that going off on a rant about "this is as dirty as rape!" is unconstructive and inappropriate.
Furthermore there are countless things that happen to everyone every day without their explicit consent and it's far less valued than you think it is. It would be unworkable if we did. Did I consent to air pollution? Noise pollution? Billboards next to the road? The laws of my society? Having a passport of the country where I happened to have been born? You replying to my comment? People emailing me? In practice consent is often either implied and assumed, or doesn't operate at the individual level (e.g. it operates via voting).
Consent is implied (or assumed) in most day to day events. However, privacy law in the EU has brought the topic of consent into the internet and onto computers, whether you want it or not. That's because digital privacy and all manner of things it accompanies has been regulated because the industry has failed to implement the necessary safeguard by itself.
You may feel like such telemetry doesn't need explicit consent, like you or me commenting on posts here, and that's a valid opinion to have. Others viscerally disagree.
I personally think digital consent is a field of computer ethics that has been ignored for way too long. I'm very happy with the GDPR and only wish government would start enforcing privacy laws more often. You're free to disagree with me and I can understand your position if you do.
For those that do consider software tracking something that requires consent, there is a real emotional impact to seeing your privacy be violated by software and devices you otherwise trust. Ignoring that because you disagree with the underlying notion can only lead to misunderstanding and exaggerated flame wars. It'll also generate distrust and friction within your community.
To all of the points you have listed where consent is usually implied or assumed, there are groups that disagree. Air and noise pollution are regulated for a good reason; laws around those are often vague because these topics are extremely situational. I do actually think most billboards should be banned from public spaces for both ethical and safety reasons. There are large groups that consider the laws in the places they've been born in to be unjust and are angry that they're subjected under them, and demand (usually through a misinterpreted or made up legal basis) that they and their peers never agreed to any of those rules. There are even laws in place about who is allowed to email you, because you did not express a desire to receive ads from random companies, though enforcement is usually completely absent.
For what it's worth, I 100% believe that the author behind this proposal is well-intentioned. The proposed methodology has been carefully constructed to respect privacy as much as possible. I also completely understand the wish for opt-out as most people simply won't choose to act on requests for opting in. However, a project like Go isn't run by a single person, and the company that does run it cannot be trusted when it comes to privacy concerns.
Regulated, yes, but that doesn't mean "I consented to [...]". Even a single person driving a car pollutes the air and noise, and none of the people who involuntarily come in contact with that car consented to that, much less explicitly consented to it. This applies to almost all motorized forms of transportation to at least some degree.
But that doesn't mean these are unreasonable things to do, or that explicit consent needs to be given. The basic rule for public life is "do what you will, unless you unreasonably inconvenience others". Although there is wide disagreement on what exactly "unreasonably inconvenience others", almost everyone across the ideological spectrum mostly agrees on that basic principle. Generally speaking, if you don't unreasonably inconvenience others then it's accepted that consent doesn't need to be given. "Unreasonable" is key here, because many things can (and do) inconvenience others, but that doesn't mean it's unreasonable because we all got to live our lives.
> You may feel like such telemetry doesn't need explicit consent
I never actually said that; I mostly wanted to comment on "I think consent is far more complex than what you're saying".
I don't actually know what I think of this. Mostly I'd like to move towards a future where "consent" is de-emphasized because if something is considered bad by the overwhelming majority of the population no one should be doing that at all in the first place.
Once the invasive tracking stops (i.e. becomes regulated) there probably isn't much need to worry about fairly innocent telemetry as this mostly seems to be a matter of trust ("I don't know what you will do with this data").
I don't really know what that would concretely look like in practice (e.g. what the exact laws should look like, how to enforce it, etc.)
What about those who use a source-based distro and have to use software written only in Go?
Assuming this proposal is implemented as stated – which I don't expect it will – then I'd expect some distros to disable it by default. Go already provided the tools to set these kind of things globally in a recent release (1.20 or 1.19 IIRC) with a global go.env file.
Well, mine were, and I don't think I was rude, pithy, or repetitive. So your calling it bullshit is, frankly, bullshit.
Hiding "I don't want this" comments also conveniently completely hides their vote counts, absolutely suppressing people's opinions.