Unless you're somehow saying telemetry doesn't report anything about what a user is doing to it's home server.
In fact the Chinese entities are even less likely to share your secrets to your governement than their best friends at Google
Apple provides telemetry services that strips the IP before providing it to the app owners. Routing like this requires trust (just as a VPN does), but it's feasible.
Even if we interact with your rhetoric[1] at face value, there is a big difference between data going to your own elected government versus that of a foreign adversary.
So many US universities running such nodes, without ever getting legal troubles. Such lucky boys
It should be a crime for Google as well.
"Whataboutism" is a logical fallacy.
"What about Google" is not a logical continuation of this discussion
Try talking to your users instead.
> The more users software has, less skills they have in average to accurately report any issues.
No amount of telemetry will solve that.
But a foreign government is limited to what it can do to you if you are not a very high-value target.
So I try as much as possible to use software and services from a non-friendly government because this is the highest guarantee that my data will not be used against me in the future.
And since we can all agree that any data that is collected will end up with the government some way or another. Using forging software is the only real guarantee.
Unless the software is open source and its server is self-hosted, it should be considered Spyware.
Distinguishing factors from your example include
1. PII is actually encoded and handled by computer systems, not the mere capability for that to occur.
2. PII is actually sent off site, not merely able to be sent off site.
3. It doesn't assert that the PII is collected, which could imply storage, it merely asserts that it is sent as my original post does. We don't know whether or not it is stored after being received and processed.
Why is it relevant whether they provide it to app owners directly? The issue people have is the information is logged now and abused later, in whatever form.
It’s easy to argue that if you are a PowerShell user or developer you benefit from no telemetry, but it’s hard to argue that you benefit from the tool you use being sidelined or defunded because corporate thinks nobody uses it. “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them even if you could contact that many people, and they would not remember how often they launched it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
Let the corporation suffer then. With an open API, a third party will make a better one. Microsoft can buy that; corporations have a habit of doing that.
> “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts
Why are you worried about the problems that scripts face? If the developer encounters issues in scripts, the developer can work to fix it. Sometimes that might mean filing a bug report... or a feature request for better documentation. Or the developer might get frustrated and use something better. Like bash.
> there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them
Why do they matter to you, or a corporation then?
> they would not remember how often they launched it.
If your users aren't interacting with you for feature requests and bug reports, then either you don't have users or you don't have good enough reachability from the users to you.
Corporations provide value to others. It's not just the corporation that is missing out.
To be clear, I consent to send telemetry from some of the tools I use and deploy.
Their common pattern? They wait a bit, and ask nicely about whether I want to participate. Also, the dialog box asking the question defaults to off.
I read the fine print, look a the data they push, ponder and decide whether I'm cool with it or not.
Give me choice, be upfront and transparent. Then we can have a conversation.
Bash isn't better.
> "Why are you worried about the problems that scripts face? Why do they matter to you?"
because I write and run such scripts.
> "Let the corporation suffer then"
Microsoft wouldn't suffer, PowerShell users would suffer.
> "sometimes that might mean filing a bug report... or a feature request for better documentation. "
In this scenario the PowerShell team has been defunded or sacked. Who will the bug report go to? Who will implement the feature request?
> "If your users aren't interacting with you for feature requests and bug reports, then either you don't have users or you don't have good enough reachability from the users to you."
Users are interacting with Microsoft for feature requests and bug reports. There are a thousand open issues on https://github.com/powershell/powershell/ and many more which were closed "due to inactivity". What difference does that make if Corporate doesn't want to fund a bigger team to fix more bugs unless it can be shown to benefit a lot of customers not just "a few" devs who raise issues?
To take your logic to its extreme, you have a disease and are prescribed pills, and the pharmaceutical company says "we will track when you take the pills - unless you don't want us to?" and you would prefer the researchers get shut down for not knowing whether anyone actually takes the pills, and an unlimited number of people die from treatable diseases that don't get cured.
It is, by virtue of running on Linux.
> because I write and run such scripts.
'kay. Learn how to do Engineering and the software will come just fine. You don't need telemetry to tell you anything about scripts. You need good error reports for your users to send to you instead.
> Microsoft wouldn't suffer, PowerShell users would suffer.
So what you're saying is that Microsoft doesn't care about its users. PowerShell users should use products from better companies then.
> In this scenario the PowerShell team has been defunded or sacked. Who will the bug report go to? Who will implement the feature request?
Why were they sacked?
Oh, right, because they didn't interact with their users.
Who will the bug report go to? Clearly it's the same as before: nobody. That's a Microsoft problem.
> What difference does that make if Corporate doesn't want to fund a bigger team to fix more bugs unless it can be shown to benefit a lot of customers not just "a few" devs who raise issues?
If Corporate doesn't want to fund bugfixes and features for people who actually file bug reports and talk to you, then that's poor behavior of corporate. Why do you want to contribute to the decline of your users privacy?
The connection is clear if your salary doesn't require you to not understand it.
Developers don't opt-in to telemetry? Maybe it's because they don't want to enable that telemetry, your experiments be damned.
Use proper engineering to demonstrate that your scripts work instead of demanding that users be your free software test team.
Similarly, a medical trial will take a very detailed consent before you can start.
Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them.
Or as a more extreme example, going through an important procedure not with the known and proven method but with an experimental one, because you didn't opt-out and nobody bothered to tell you this. In reality, you need to sign consent and waiver forms to accept experimental methods.
If the app owner can't obtain PII, I don't believe the app owner is spying.
Is Apple spying?
> Routing like this requires trust
It depends on if you trust them, and their privacy policy. If they're functioning as a PII stripping proxy, as they claim, then I would claim no, to the extent of what's technically possible. I would also claim that a trustworthy VPN is not spying on you. YOMV.
This telemetry is not about demonstrating that scripts work, as I have said to you multiple times.
I did not say that. Within the context of Microsoft's internal funding, maybe, but we could have the same improvement by Microsoft throwing more money at the PowerShell team without this telemetry. The core thing I said was that the information the telemetry gets cannot be got by "talk to your users" not that the telemetry leads to amazing improvements.
It is still difficult for you to make the case that someone choosing to download PowerShell can be "not consenting" (and before you reply saying "PowerShell ships with Windows", the PowerShell which has telemetry does not [yet] ship with Windows).
Yes, I agree that person's comparison to non-consensual medical research is stupid.
> "Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them."
More akin to your insurance company making a public RFC where you can discuss the coming telemetry, then you choosing to ask your insurance for an optional toothbrush, being able to opt out of telemetry if you want to, the insurance company documenting how to opt out[1], you being able to edit the toothbrush source code to remove the telemetry entirely with the insurance company's approval because it's MIT licensed, and absolutely nothing happening to you if you opt out.