Do_not_track

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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`

[0]: https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/42932

just sinkhole the domains

https://dpaste.com/E7RZ34MVD

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

I thought it would be a sh script to automatically set the flags for all known do not track env vars.

> 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.

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):

    $ cat /usr/local/bin/deno
    #!/bin/sh
    exec env DENO_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 /usr/local/packages/deno/latest/bin/deno "$@"

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 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?

Given the URL and list of different opt-outs I thought this was going to be a shell script to set all these for you. In fact, I've just had an idea...

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

It worked so well on the browser already

You can also use network namespaces to simply block internet access for certain processes. It can even be finetuned with whitelists or blacklists.

Also this, we disable it when building or deploying apps in DollarDeploy

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

Privacy should be treated as a right, not something that can be abused for money. Love the idea of this

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.

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?

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.

He’s better off vibecoding an include.sh that sets all the known do not track env vars for you.

Am I the only one who also finds it comical that rejecting cookies requires a cookie.