Mediapipe now includes undocumented telemetry

[cchadowitz]

Sometime between 0.10.21 and 0.10.35, an internal logging/telemetry library has either been introduced as a dependency or updated to automatically send telemetry data when using mediapipe.

The following findings are from installing the pip packages for the relevant mediapipe versions available on PyPI.

In 0.10.35, after running the following:

face_detector = mediapipe.tasks.vision.FaceDetector.create_from_options(options)

I can occasionally see these log messages (while the python interpreter is still open but not actively executing anything):

E0000 00:00:1778098539.490043 26131921 portable_clearcut_uploader.cc:90] Failed to send to clearcut: FAILED_PRECONDITION: Not valid for uploading until: 2026-05-06T16:16:39.430642-04:00
=== Source Location Trace: === 
wireless/android/play/playlog/cplusplus/portable_clearcut_uploader.cc:180

There is no reference to clearcut in the entire open source mediapipe repository, and it appears that the PyPI packages are built internal to Google and not from this repository directly, which means there is no way to trace it back to any particular commit.

In addition, if I use dumpcap/Wireshark, I can see that it is making connections to 216.239.*, which resolves to play.googleapis.com.

The same analysis on 0.10.21 shows no connections or log messages.

This raises a few questions:

1. Why is this telemetry is included by default in the open source project binaries?
2. If it is intentionally included, why is there no documentation to indicate its presence and how to disable it? If building the pip packages from source is the official method to remove/disable this, there should be documentation to make that clear.
3. What is the internal process that builds the publicly available pip packages for mediapipe, since it appears to not be based on the open source repository itself?

[cchadowitz]

@akashvverma1995 any context you can add to this?

[Jeka8833]

I haven't checked exactly what data is transmitted via telemetry, but it raised too many questions. + That log message is really annoying when you're processing tens of thousands of images.

[marcreichman-pfi]

@schmidt-sebastian @akashvverma1995 Is there any answer for this question? Or at least a way to disable this telemetry?

[schmidt-sebastian]

Hello - sorry for the late reply. Unfortunately, we will be rolling out telemetry for all of our platforms. We always included this via our Terms of Service (https://developers.google.com/edge/mediapipe/legal/tos), which we are/will make more prominent. The telemetry is designed to not interfere with any active usage and should not be printing any logs even if we cannot send data to the server (so a fix for this is coming). We are not adding an official API to disable this data collection, as this will skew with out data and make it impossible to use this data and not allow us to correctly make decisions on what areas our team should focus on.
You can build the SDK from source, which will not include telemetry, or you can block access to the host. We will not and will never send any input data to our servers. Again, sorry that we don't have better news, but having this data is important for our team.

[google-ml-butler]

Are you satisfied with the resolution of your issue?
Yes
No

[marcreichman-pfi]

@schmidt-sebastian thanks for your response. as of now i have not been able to build the docker build for mediapipe following the directions, and i'm trying to build for python 3.14. if python 3.14 wheels would be provided for 0.10.21, or reliable directions for 0.10.35 with python 3.14 in docker, that would help to work around this issue.