Communicate plan on how to modify metrics to be opt-in now that 1.0 is released

[lee-dohm]

Per our conversation related to #16, please let us know what the team's thoughts are on how to make metrics be opt-in now that Atom is out of Beta. Let us know if there is any information or feedback from the community the Atom team needs to make the best decision!

Thanks!

[yukulele]

👍

[ghost]

👍

But to make it really 'uncreepy' you would have to get rid of Google Analytics and use Piwik instead. This data is still saved on Google servers, so unless you switch to an open source tracking service on your own server it is creepy.
(See issue #43)

[yonas]

I'm shocked that this is not opt-in....

I found out that Atom was sending reports to Google by reading the Wikipedia article. I doubt most people will be doing that.

[itay-grudev]

Guys, it's a plugin after all. You can just disable it.

P.S. I just made a pull-request modifying the SHA-1 hash of the MAC address to SHA-256 and I verified that the code that sends the HTTPS request sends either a random UUID v4 or a SHA-1 (though this should be updated), so in both cases your anonymity is (SHA1)preserved.

[ghost]

@yonas How is atom sending reports to Google via Wikipedia!?

No, he meant something else:

I found out that Atom was sending reports to Google by reading the Wikipedia article.

[ghost]

P.S. I just made a pull-request modifying the SHA-1 hash of the MAC address to SHA-256 and I verified that the code that sends the HTTPS request sends either a random UUID v4 or a SHA-1 (though this should be updated), so in both cases your anonymity is (SHA1)preserved.

It's still a MAC address, which can be brute-forced quite easily.

[ghost]

@yonas Where does that happen. Repo/File/Line. Let's hunt it down and fix it!

Eh, what? 😕 Atom is sending reports to Google - that's the whole idea of this package. It's Google Analytics...

[yonas]

@itay-grudev blobgo is right, this package isn't broken, so there's nothing to fix in this package.

What we need to do is make this package not enabled by default.

[COLABORATI]

Please repost about the ongoing efforts of this issue to the interested public, thanks!

[chpio]

+1

[n1trux]

I think the solution in #41 is quite a good one for the time being. Please review this.

[damieng]

All users both new and existing/upgrades will be prompted to make a choice with regards to telemetry as shown in the screenshot at atom/atom#12281

There isn't a separate option for exception-reporting as multiple options would likely confuse the issue further. If you wish to allow exception-reporting but not metrics then you could opt-in and disable the metrics package.

[lee-dohm]

Since @damieng posted the plan, I'm going to close this 😀