[sneak]

Note well that it will silently send lots of information about your machine and browsing/usage to Google:

https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366

They added a tiny mention in the installer when I complained, but they still don’t mention how to opt out. The opt out doesn’t disable the spyware in the webpage, either.

I have a patched version (sneak/netdata) on dockerhub, if you like. The issue is that it’s just not that great of a system monitor. Looking at, say, a “last 24h” chart is difficult. It’s a good and pretty replacement for top/htop/iptraf/iotop, but that’s pretty much it. You still need a graphite or prometheus or mrtg/rrdtool ultimately for serious understanding beyond “what happened in the last few minutes”.

[314]

There are 17 lines of text output to verify the installation choices, of them 5 are devoted to opting out of the anonymous telemetry. The wording seems clear.

  NOTE:
  Anonymous usage stats will be collected and sent to Google Analytics.
  To opt-out, pass --disable-telemetry option to the installer or export
  the enviornment variable DO_NOT_TRACK to a non-zero or non-empty value
  (e.g: export DO_NOT_TRACK=1).

[sneak]

Also worth mentioning: they are lying when they say it’s anonymous. It includes your IP address, which is a globally unique identifier. I believe it also transmits an installation ID, which persists on the machine.

It is absolutely not anonymous.

[314]

I doubt that my IP address is a globally unique identifier. I can think of 15-20 devices that are sharing it now. Advertising networks jump through a lot of hoops to tie those devices together in a small cluster of user profiles.

How does the installation ID identify a person?

[sneak]

Ahh, nice to see they updated it. Too bad they're still not actually getting consent.

[314]

This message appears before a y/n confirmation prompt - i.e. explicit user consent.

[sneak]

The y/n is for install. It’s saying “do you want to install with telemetry, xor not install at all.”

That’s like those EULAs on websites that say “by continuing to use our site, you agree never to sue us, to surrender your first born to us, and to never speak ill of us for any reason, et c.”

That’s simply not affirmative consent. Imagine if you tried that in life! “Anyone who stays in this room after 5pm is consenting to be groped! Proceed at your own risk.”

That’s not how any of this works. Stating your intentions to assume and potentially violate consent is not obtaining consent.

[314]

I took another look, it's not a y/n prompt as I wrote before. It lists all the settings and asks for confirmation. Each of the other settings requires a trip to the docs to find out how to change before re-running. The telemetry is given special prominence with instructions about how to change before the prompt.