It's interesting that we're so used to be tracked at this point that no one balks at being opted-in by default. A flag called DO_NOT_TRACK sounds like a good idea, but also suggests the default is CONSENT_TO_TRACK=1, and I find that creepy.
thephyber 1 hours ago [-]
Do not track WHEN?
This flag is sent by my browser when I connect to SOMEONE ELSE’s SERVER.
The internet only took off because the primary business model which ran on ads and derivative information that servers do to their users.
It’s not fun. It’s not private or secure. It’s not illegal (in most jurisdictions for most industries). The flag exists as a response to the de facto and de jure state of the world, not some fairytale scenario.
charles_f 44 minutes ago [-]
Article quite literally talks about tracking of cli tools you run on your own computer, half of which are to pilot products that you pay with your own money.
Get off your high horse.
doginasuit 20 minutes ago [-]
I would advocate for not getting your horse high to begin with, or hide your stash better.
PufPufPuf 5 hours ago [-]
This is set up for the same fate as DNT in browsers. Collecting all the "do not track" env vars into a single "do_not_track.env" file, however, may not be a bad idea...
whitlock 5 hours ago [-]
https://toptout.me - exists and handles a lot of these problems, if not looking to create a new wheel.
Advertisers chose to ignore DNT because they claimed Microsoft making DNT enabled by default took agency away from the user. In reality, they probably weren't going to honor it anyway.
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
Microsoft is too sophisticated to plead ignorance; they are responsible for that outcome and I think we can assume they knowningly chose it. (Though now Microsoft browsers are such a small portion of the market that it doesn't matter.)
The biggest failure of DNT was browser makers - including Mozilla - removing it. It has zero performance impact (1 bit?) or development cost. As long as it was out there, when there was momentum against tracking, advocates had evidence of both demand for privacy and of trackers ignoring user wishes.
applfanboysbgon 17 minutes ago [-]
> advocates had evidence of both demand for privacy and of trackers ignoring user wishes.
This evidence both still exists and is also completely useless for anything. The more important consideration, by far, is that the DNT flag was actively harmful to users in the real world because, if it was acknowledged at all, it was used maliciously to help fingerprint and track users. There is no reason for browsers to continue providing to their users a toggle that not only misleads them about what will happen with the setting enabled, but actively contributes to the opposite outcome because we live in a world where being evil is the norm.
whitlock 5 hours ago [-]
Love it. This is an annoying problem and likely the actual solution than asking folks to use a universal one. I'll put something together as a starting point.
spudlyo 6 hours ago [-]
I was surprised how hard it was to stop the Python transformers library from phoning home to Hugging Face. I set HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1, and when I called Wav2Vec2CTCTokenizer.from_pretrained I explicitly passed local_files_only=True, but still I got got a warning about not having a valid HF_TOKEN. It wasn't until I stumbled upon HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 that I'm somewhat confident that I'm not making outgoing connections to HF every time I load a wav2vec2 model from disk.
I wouldn't have realized this was happening at all if it weren't for the obnoxious HF_TOKEN warning.
woodson 4 hours ago [-]
HF is notorious for making it difficult to work offline (or at least not waste time trying to connect when everything needed is offline) and is constantly changing how it is being handled. Previously, there was TRANSFORMERS_OFFLINE, HF_DATASETS_OFFLINE, etc.
ximm 6 hours ago [-]
Looks like a helpful honeypot! Any tool that will public announce support for this spec is a tool I know to avoid because it collects telemetry without explicit opt-in in the first place.
GuB-42 4 hours ago [-]
DO_NOT_TRACK support doesn't mean tracking is not an explicit opt-in.
Example: the software crashes, and there is a crash handler that asks you if you want to send a crash dump. With DO_NOT_TRACK, the crash handler is disabled entirely, no question, no dump.
If it gets some adoption, that's probably how it will work. Those who have an financial interest in using tracking (ex: ads) probably won't support such an option.
bstsb 3 hours ago [-]
i can't think of a single CLI that is possibly collecting analytics for ads
SpyCoder77 5 hours ago [-]
Most services are already collecting telemetry, them announcing support for it won't change that.
xandrius 5 hours ago [-]
Well, don't look too deep else you won't be using many modern tools.
msla 4 hours ago [-]
Hey, it's a list of services to feed fake data to!
drnick1 6 hours ago [-]
It's probably easier to run your own DNS and blacklist the offending domains. There are good blacklists with millions of telemetry domains, e.g. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists.
tosti 5 hours ago [-]
Better yet, don't allow such spyware crap on your computer.
0123456789ABCDE 3 hours ago [-]
pfft, just don't have a computer and you'll be good
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
That is the correct way of handling this.
Everyone proclaiming a "standard" is just adding to the long list of (unofficial) alternatives.
LeoPanthera 6 hours ago [-]
The most useful part of this page is the list of optout commands to stick in my shellrc.
Is anyone maintaining a more complete list of those?
paddw 6 hours ago [-]
an LLM would do a fine job for most common things, doesn't really matter if a few of them get hallucinated
joshka 35 minutes ago [-]
It feels like this should be no_track, for consistency with no_color
dnnddidiej 51 minutes ago [-]
Love the idea but is an env var enough. Are there some sessions (docker?) that may not get it.
I'd prefer TRACK_ME as an opt in.
smartmic 6 hours ago [-]
> Many CLI tools, SDKs, and frameworks collect telemetry data by default.
Any of those are using a dark pattern and before exploring new ways to opt out you should look for and spend your energy on an alternative which respects your freedoms upfront.
Otek 6 hours ago [-]
Exactly, new “standard” won’t fix it
XCSme 5 hours ago [-]
I thought it would be a sh script to automatically set the flags for all known do not track env vars.
3 hours ago [-]
batisteo 6 hours ago [-]
It worked so well on the browser already
0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think there is any way to stop people from tracking you. Technically speaking, you can pretty much always be tracked. Even if you eliminated all third party requests you could still be tracked. Downloads, logins, queries, etc all can be tracked. Virtually all software now has the "continuously upgrade to the latest version" bullshit so you are tracked every time you open the app. Even if you turn it off, they stop the app from working until you upgrade, so they force you to be tracked.
I think the only solution is to make it law that you can't track anyone for any reason without their consent, and can't sell consensual tracking data without an additional consent agreement. It would be a huge blow to the advertising industry, so it will never be made law, but it's the only thing that would work.
pizzly 4 hours ago [-]
Also every time you install a program Microsoft, Apple and Google knows depending on the device. For your safety of course. The tracking is so pervasive and the majority of people do not care.
slashdev 4 hours ago [-]
It’s already a law in Europe. GDPR and ePrivacy. You have to get consent from the user. Having worked for European companies, they take it seriously.
ezfe 11 minutes ago [-]
The assumption that telemetry is not allowed by GDPR is flawed
Domain blocking is my preference but I would imagine that trackers probably also try to weed out data that contains racism, sexism, lewdness or some combination thereof. People can get very creative with ASCII art. AI surely does not accept such things.
jamietanna 4 hours ago [-]
Was wondering if there was a list of known opt outs as we are looking at a default opt out in Renovate[0] - we'll also look to set `DO_NOT_TRACK`
This is just sad. Luckily I do not use any of the listed programs. I threw out Homebrew many years ago when they started this nonsense.
The only tool I have installed currently that does %/"($& like this is Deno (required for yt-dlp now). It phones happily home even if you wrap it into a wrapper script that forces the env variable (in no way I'll pollute my default environment with stuff like this):
I wish bad dreams to whoever puts such crap into their software! Thankfully I have Little Snitch to catch most of those kind of invasions of my privacy.
victorkulla 5 hours ago [-]
The issue is that it is not enforced. My version of My IP will tell you if 'Do Not track' and 'Global Privacy Control' are set by your browser but it is up to the website to honour your requests. Check if your browser is sending them by visiting: https://fshot.org/utils/myip.php
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
That's great, but isn't DNT deprecated?
buybackoff 4 hours ago [-]
No, it should be a required (by law) opt-in TRACK_ME_I_DO_NOT_CARE_OR_AM_A_TEAPOT=418.
The proposed way just normalizes tracking.
jonhohle 1 hours ago [-]
And setting that env var should require a notarized consent to track contract that has an expiration of at most 60 days and has penalties of jail time for any data related to that telemetry, anonymized or not that is shared with a third party, for any reason, including but not limited to fulfilling the service the business purports to be providing.
It should be much more difficult to collect data than to opt out of collection.
huksley 6 hours ago [-]
Also this, we disable it when building or deploying apps in DollarDeploy
I'd be interested in,
1. a SOME-TRUST model: a list of opt-outs for the known software that collect telemetry; so that I can just paste that into an env file and be done with it.
2. a ZERO-TRUST model [preferable]: where I control if an application can send any telemetry data; instead of depending on a flag that the distributor may or may not respect.
amelius 4 hours ago [-]
You can also use network namespaces to simply block internet access for certain processes. It can even be finetuned with whitelists or blacklists.
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
Could you provide more details? Many applications use multiple processes, and use some intermittently. It seems like quite a bit of work to enumerate every process used and then to keep the white/blacklist updated as usage and software changes - every new application or command you use, every update, every OS change that affects networking or system calls etc ...
amelius 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, with security comes inconvenience, this is inevitable.
I'm not a daily user of network namespaces, and would probably write a script to do the configuration within a shell (it works a bit like containers). The configuration is inherited by child processes, so you only have to do it once. Basically whitelist the urls you typically use, and maybe let the script popup a dialog asking you to allow access when the firewall catches a domain that is not in the whitelist yet.
ivanjermakov 2 hours ago [-]
If solution was real, it would be DO_TRACK=1, not the inverse.
6 hours ago [-]
ninjahawk1 4 hours ago [-]
Privacy should be treated as a right, not something that can be abused for money. Love the idea of this
kstrauser 5 hours ago [-]
I’m morally opposed to the notion of optimizing the opt-out mechanism. I want a standardized opt-in mechanism, like:
export ALLOW_TRACKING=telemetry,crash_dumps
and the absence of such a setting means “fuck off, don’t spy on me”. It’s not my responsibility to turn off apps wanting to track me. It’s their responsibility to get me to authorize their specific flavor of tracking.
cj 4 hours ago [-]
> It’s their responsibility to get me to authorize their specific flavor of tracking.
And they do by burying it in the user agreement you probably agreed to.
Like it or not, it is your responsibility. I agree it shouldn’t be, but let’s be realistic.
msla 4 hours ago [-]
Then it's my responsibility to feed them fake data.
They didn't opt out of my data, after all.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
Honest question, what's the problem with crash dumps that include no personal info? They just help make the software less buggy. I also don't see an issue with anonymized usage patterns (this feature was used X times this month, this one Y times, etc).
Can someone expound on what they see as a problem?
JoshTriplett 5 hours ago [-]
> Honest question, what's the problem with crash dumps that include no personal info?
In addition to the other response: crash dumps are difficult to anonymize, both because useful crash dumps include something like a minidump (or some other small alternative to a core file), and because even without that, any random information from a backtrace may be sensitive (e.g. a URL).
There's nothing wrong with saving a crash dump and giving the user control of whether to submit a bug report.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
I'm more thinking Python crashes, where you just get the lines that executed, and ~zero identifiable data.
circadian 5 hours ago [-]
I would suggest that the default to enrolling people in supplying such information is the issue. In a world driven by surveillance capitalism, even "anonymous" data can be used for much broader purposes (think, for example, of when and where people are using tools geographically and at what times: you can start to track the behaviour of people in this way).
Users should never be opted in through usage alone of free or paid-for tooling to supply information that isn't part of the function of the tool. Where that is required for a service or product, you should opt-in explicitly, not implicitly.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
That's fair, thanks.
walrus01 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure this will be about as effective as putting yourself on the do not call list for domestic phone telemarketers, which has absolutely no effect whatsoever on overseas scam call centers.
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
This does not make sense to support. Businesses that have proper privacy controls and security do not want to be lumped together with random shady apps and want users to explicitly opt out. Another issue with this header is that users could set it and then accidentally opt out of other sharing that they don't realize since this header is being set somewhere random. Standardizing on a per app basis way to revoke consent, along with showing privacy polices and measures the apps have put in place for guarding security would be a more sensible alternative that could gain traction.
varispeed 5 hours ago [-]
Default opt-in tracking should be illegal and enforced with such fines and prison sentences, that companies wouldn't even dare to have anything remotely capable of tracking in the runtime.
Unfortunately big corporations can always find away to make regulators see no problem.
tonymet 5 hours ago [-]
He’s better off vibecoding an include.sh that sets all the known do not track env vars for you.
nixpulvis 4 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one who also finds it comical that rejecting cookies requires a cookie.
brettdav 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
avazhi 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
iririririr 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 00:57:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This flag is sent by my browser when I connect to SOMEONE ELSE’s SERVER.
The internet only took off because the primary business model which ran on ads and derivative information that servers do to their users.
It’s not fun. It’s not private or secure. It’s not illegal (in most jurisdictions for most industries). The flag exists as a response to the de facto and de jure state of the world, not some fairytale scenario.
Get off your high horse.
Though if you just want a simple ENV var that handles this WHILE honoring the specification on this page: https://github.com/alloydwhitlock/do-not-track-cli
The biggest failure of DNT was browser makers - including Mozilla - removing it. It has zero performance impact (1 bit?) or development cost. As long as it was out there, when there was momentum against tracking, advocates had evidence of both demand for privacy and of trackers ignoring user wishes.
This evidence both still exists and is also completely useless for anything. The more important consideration, by far, is that the DNT flag was actively harmful to users in the real world because, if it was acknowledged at all, it was used maliciously to help fingerprint and track users. There is no reason for browsers to continue providing to their users a toggle that not only misleads them about what will happen with the setting enabled, but actively contributes to the opposite outcome because we live in a world where being evil is the norm.
I wouldn't have realized this was happening at all if it weren't for the obnoxious HF_TOKEN warning.
Example: the software crashes, and there is a crash handler that asks you if you want to send a crash dump. With DO_NOT_TRACK, the crash handler is disabled entirely, no question, no dump.
If it gets some adoption, that's probably how it will work. Those who have an financial interest in using tracking (ex: ads) probably won't support such an option.
Everyone proclaiming a "standard" is just adding to the long list of (unofficial) alternatives.
Is anyone maintaining a more complete list of those?
I'd prefer TRACK_ME as an opt in.
Any of those are using a dark pattern and before exploring new ways to opt out you should look for and spend your energy on an alternative which respects your freedoms upfront.
I think the only solution is to make it law that you can't track anyone for any reason without their consent, and can't sell consensual tracking data without an additional consent agreement. It would be a huge blow to the advertising industry, so it will never be made law, but it's the only thing that would work.
https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-26/
https://dpaste.com/E7RZ34MVD
https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
[0]: https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/42932
The only tool I have installed currently that does %/"($& like this is Deno (required for yt-dlp now). It phones happily home even if you wrap it into a wrapper script that forces the env variable (in no way I'll pollute my default environment with stuff like this):
I wish bad dreams to whoever puts such crap into their software! Thankfully I have Little Snitch to catch most of those kind of invasions of my privacy.The proposed way just normalizes tracking.
It should be much more difficult to collect data than to opt out of collection.
export SEMGREP_SEND_METRICS=off export COLLECT_LEARNINGS_OPT_OUT=true export STORYBOOK_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 export NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export SLS_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export SLS_NOTIFICATIONS_MODE=off export DISABLE_OPENCOLLECTIVE=true export NPM_CONFIG_UPDATE_NOTIFIER=false
I'm not a daily user of network namespaces, and would probably write a script to do the configuration within a shell (it works a bit like containers). The configuration is inherited by child processes, so you only have to do it once. Basically whitelist the urls you typically use, and maybe let the script popup a dialog asking you to allow access when the firewall catches a domain that is not in the whitelist yet.
And they do by burying it in the user agreement you probably agreed to.
Like it or not, it is your responsibility. I agree it shouldn’t be, but let’s be realistic.
They didn't opt out of my data, after all.
Can someone expound on what they see as a problem?
In addition to the other response: crash dumps are difficult to anonymize, both because useful crash dumps include something like a minidump (or some other small alternative to a core file), and because even without that, any random information from a backtrace may be sensitive (e.g. a URL).
There's nothing wrong with saving a crash dump and giving the user control of whether to submit a bug report.
Users should never be opted in through usage alone of free or paid-for tooling to supply information that isn't part of the function of the tool. Where that is required for a service or product, you should opt-in explicitly, not implicitly.
Unfortunately big corporations can always find away to make regulators see no problem.