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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] New UUID in Eclipse Platform

Hi

This seems to be a significant failure in courtesy by the EF.

a) not notifying committers before M7 that this was planned.

b) not notifying committers at M7 that it was in place

c) notifying committers at such a late time that the notification stinks

d) not giving users a genuine opt-out.

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But let's get real.

If Eclipse was a paid for product, users would have to accept some objectionable Ts & Cs without reading and receive a unique license id enabling their usage to be tracked. Far worse than anything Eclipse is proposing even if the UUIDs are cracked by malware.

Strangely, Eclipse users never accept anything if they only use an EPP; only additional installs require mindless acceptance of unread Ts and Cs.

It seems that if we are to continue to treat our users in a genuinely Open fashion, we must introduce a first usage Ts and Cs acceptance dialog with an opt-in for anything that even slightly impinges on privacy. If this cannot be done at a platform-only RC5, then I feel that it should wait till Neon.1.

I hope the EF will learn from this and treat committers and users with more respect in future.

    Regards

        Ed Willink


On 04/06/2016 10:31, Markus Knauer wrote:
So late in the release cycle?
Without any broader involvement of and verification by the Eclipse community? Just an announcement after Neon RC3 (or after Platform RC4)?
Not as an opt-in like in AERI?
Without any further notice to the user at all?
WITHOUT any working opt-out mechanism? Giving the user the theoretical chance to edit a file and set a property to '0' cannot be called a valid opt-out option.
And all that from an Open Source organisation?

I believe our users downloading Eclipse deserve more respect. Silently introducing even more user tracking is nothing that I want to be identified with.

Markus



On 4 June 2016 at 10:31, Ed Willink <ed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi

This hardly seems last minute at all. My ${user.home}/.eclipse/eclipse.uuid has a

#Tue May 03 08:41:32 BST 2016

timestamp indicating that it was almost certainly created by M7. Why the one month delay in notifying us?

Why no start up dialog in M7 onwards informing us that we are being default opted in?

    Regards

        Ed Willink
On 04/06/2016 06:50, Christian Campo wrote:
hi

is that a last minute idea that came up recently or why is it only revealed now that is pretty much too late for any change ?

Gruß

Christian

Am 03.06.2016 um 17:13 schrieb Ian Skerrett <ian.skerrett@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

All,

I wanted to make everyone aware that a UUID has been added to the Eclipse Platform [1] and is available in the current Neon RC.  This was done at the request of the Eclipse Foundation.

 

The UUID is automatically generated and stored in the ${user.home}/.eclipse/eclipse.uuid file. The UUID does not contain any personally identifiable information. If a user do not want to have this property set they are instructed to set eclipse.uuid=0. Information about the UUID has been included in the Eclipse Platform N&N [2].

The UUID will be automatically added to the user-agent of http requests to *.eclipse.org servers. For Neon, the projects that make these types of requests include p2 [1], MPC [3] and AERI [4]. I would expect other projects will add a uuid in the future.

 

The immediate questions for many people are 1) why are we doing this, and 2) what about the privacy concerns.  Let me attempt to answer both of these questions.

Why are we doing this?

The Eclipse Foundation has started an program to better understand our user community. We are using a log file analysis service, Splunk, to analyze many of our log files to get a better idea of how people are using Eclipse. For instance, how many people actively use Eclipse, what version of Java is the most popular with the Eclipse user community, what version of Eclipse Platform is being used or what operating system is being used? In the past, this type of information was typically a ‘best guess’. We believe can do better by having the actual data of our user community. The UUID will allow us to get a more accurate answer to many of these questions.

What about the privacy concerns?

The UUID is anonymous and does not contain personably identifiable information. We only intend to use and analyze the UUID at an aggregate level. A user is able to opt-out of sending a UUID by setting eclipse.uuid=0. The Eclipse Foundation has a published Privacy Policy [5] that details our specific practices.

 Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I appreciate this might be a sensitive topic but I do believe it is the right thing to do for the Eclipse community.

Regards

Ian

 

 [1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=490112

[2] https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.6/platform.php

[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=492916

[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=492917

[4] https://eclipse.org/legal/privacy.php

 

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