Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cogman10 732 days ago
Hey, this isn't the sort of telemetry we are talking about with OTel.

About the only "privacy concern" with otel is that you are probably shipping traces/metrics to a cloud provider for your internal applications. This isn't the sort of telemetry getting baked into ms or google that is used to try and identify personal aspects of individuals, this is data that tells you "Foo app is taking 300ms serving /bar which is unusual".

1 comments

After I added OTel to an open source project I run, I spent a bit of time arguing with someone about telemetry - they kept saying they didn't opt in and that we need to inform our users about it, etc., and I kept saying no, that's not the same type of telemetry. I wonder how common this misconception is.
This is the second time I've seen this misconception come up in HN and I've definitely seen it in Reddit at least once.
OpenTracing was a much clearer name, especially for those of us who really don't care about doing logging or metrics through OTel.