Note that netdata phones home without consent in the default configuration. For many, the whole point of doing system-administration is selfhosting and autonomy, and privacy is frequently a big component of that.

Netdata blows a big hole in that by transmitting your usage information off of your box without getting permission.

That's a bit unfair. In the docs we are being very upfront that you can opt-out of anonymous telemetry: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/get

we use the data we gather in order to make smarter product decisions. We want to invest resources where it matters, so we need to know how our users use the product.

We are also very detailed on what we gather: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/agent/netdata-security

Lastly, we just changed our analytics engine, from google-analytics to a self-hosted posthog, which is an open-source product analytics platform

The telemetry isn't anonymous: it includes the client IP; the method you use to transmit the data cannot work anonymously.

Additionally, what's actually unfair is that you proceed with this spying without the consent of the user. Being upfront about it is not obtaining consent: it's just informing the user you're about to violate their (lack of) consent.

You must obtain consent from the user first, before transmitting their information. Otherwise, your software is spyware. (Disclosing that you're going to spy on the user doesn't make you not-spyware.)

> we use the data we gather in order to make smarter product decisions.

Yes, you transmit the private data of the user for the express purpose of enriching yourself.

Opt-out is unethical: you must obtain opt-in consent first. The data you are transmitting does not belong to you.

We actually mask the ip address (https://github.com/netdata/dashboard/blob/master/src/domains...) so it's not even sent - we just send "127.0.0.1" as the IP into our self hosted PostHog. Likewise with any URL, referrer type event properties that could leak a hostname to us - we don't want that data at all so explicitly mask it before even capturing it in our telemetry system.

Previously, when using a fairly standard Google Analytics implementation, we could not really have this level of control all that easily.

So the hope is that with PostHog we can do better here while still enabling some really useful product telemetry to help us understand how to make the product better over time and try catch bugs and issues quicker too.

Oh and we have removed Google Tag Manager (GTM) from the agent dashboard too so that that's no longer around as a possibility for loading other third party tags too.

You can read more here: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/docs/anonymou...

p.s. PostHog is really cool - check it out: https://posthog.com/docs#philosophy, https://github.com/PostHog/posthog