Homebrew is arguably the best package manager for OSX around. It’s a great project, I’ve been using it for years, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to in a very clean manner. Unfortunately, the team decided to track the behaviour of its users via Google Analytics.
This is bad.
- Open Source is about trust. Trust is underminded by things like tracking.
- Do not track your users. In the rare case you really need anonymous data, ask your users first.
- Never use Google products (or any other “big data” company that relies on making money out of the data you provide) to track your users.
- Using Google’s tracking and then calling it “anonymous” is a lie. Google collects tons of information of its users and even non-users. There’s no way to know what data Google will relate internally. Even if you don’t get to see all of the collected information, Google still has them.
- Opt-out is never an excuse. It always excludes most users (which either don’t care, or have more severe things to care about than protecting their privacy in every random app they’re using).
Read on to lean howto fix the issue for at least yourself.